The view from a Cessna reveals some dirty secrets. Flying at 2,000 feet above the forests of Appalachia I can see what the steep, tree-fringed roads fail to show: unnatural flat tops, seams of coal exposed like black-topped runways, impoundments of foul water perched above homes and schools. A naked honesty is revealed. This is what we have done, what we continue to do. We deface the mountains, denature ecosystems.

This is probably not news to you. Appalachia has long been one of the centers of American energy extraction, a place whose history is almost synonymous with coal. Since the 1830s the region has shoveled 35 billion tons of coal into the furnace of our economy. This is often called “cheap” energy and, at $100/megawatt-hour, it is – as long as you don’t look too closely.

But when you get down on the ground (or up in the air, as the case may be), the costs come into focus. Mountaintop removal coal mining is just what it sounds like: Entire mountaintops are obliterated to reach thin seams of coal. The “overburden” – the mining industry’s term for rocks and soil – is dumped into nearby valleys, burying streams, covering forests.

In a way, it makes perfect sense. First we go after the resources that are easiest to extract. And then, to maintain our wolfish appetite for energy, we have to seek out the stuff that’s harder to reach. Mountaintop removal coal mining is a classic example. Another would be the strip mining used to extract bitumen from the Alberta tar sands. Additional cases include hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling to get at shale gas and shale oil deposits.

Michael T. Klare, author of the book The Race for What’s Left, calls these kinds of extraction techniques “extreme energy.” He has written: “To ensure a continued supply of hydrocarbons – and the continued prosperity of the giant energy companies – successive administrations have promoted the exploitation of these extreme energy options with a striking disregard for the resulting dangers. By their very nature, such efforts involve an ever-increasing risk of human and environmental catastrophe – something that has been far too little acknowledged.”

I, for one, want to acknowledge those risks.

**

This summer my partner and I took a three-month roadtrip across North America. We didn’t head for the national parks or wild and scenic areas, though we did pass through some beautiful scenery. Instead, our itinerary focused on the places that have been the most impacted by extreme energy extraction. We wanted to see the communities – “sacrifice zones,” they’re sometimes called – that have been scarred and scored by the ‘dozers and drill rigs. We wanted to learn about the people who live there.

You might remember that it wasn’t too long ago that “Peak Oil” was the buzz. We were warned that oil, as well as gas, were finite, and that we would soon reach a point beyond which global demand would exceed supply. This was supposed to be both a curse and a blessing. We would have to make a wrenching transition to renewable sources of energy, but we would be better off for it. Geology would save us from our own gluttony.

But now here we are, in 2013, and we remain firmly entrenched in fossil fuels. The peak has turned out to be more like a long, tortuous plateau, sustained by the steady production of harder to reach energy resources. In the United States and Canada, oil and gas production have actually increased since 2008, even as consumption has decreased and then flat-lined. What has allowed business as usual to continue? It’s not that we’ve “discovered” new oil and gas. Rather, technological breakthroughs and changes in the market have suddenly made extreme energy (“unconventional energy,” is the industry’s preferred term) economically viable.

Peak or no peak, extreme oil or conventional oil – it’s simply more of the same to a largely degraded planet and an atmosphere already burdened with greenhouse gases. If Peak Oil threatened a disruption of our oil-dependent lifestyles, the long Petroleum Plateau promises a continuation of that lifestyle – at the cost of disrupting the planet’s life systems.

“For the climate, the race for unconventional hydrocarbons is very bad news,” says Richard Heinberg, a prominent peak oil-er and author of Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines. “The claims for shale gas and tight oil are a mish-mash of half-truth, exaggeration, and distortion. But they add up to a happy story that Americans want to believe – a story about the wonders of technology, the limitless abundance of nature, and the allure of the endless highway.”

Right now we’re speeding along that highway … but to what end? And at what cost? It turns out, if you veer off the highway and hit some of our country’s less traveled roads, you can see how the race to extract unconventional, extreme sources of energy is transforming communities.

The view from the edge, I can tell you, isn’t pretty.

**

Jared Lusk knows his job is one of the most dangerous in the world and he’s afraid … of losing it.

“I’m scared to death every morning when I wake up and go to the mine to get a pink slip,” he said. Lusk, 25, is an underground coal miner in West Virginia. Without coal, Lusk believes, there is no southern West Virginia: Mining, he says, is the cultural and economic lifeblood. He’s downright poetic about his allegiance. “When a miner cuts a piece of rock out in front of you, that’s a rock that no man in this world has ever seen,” he says. “Whenever you put your hand on that rock, you’ve touched a rock that no man in this world is ever going to touch. It’s a feeling of accomplishment. All I gotta do is drive by a house and see the light on and know, ‘Hey, that light’s on because of me.’”

Lusk is parroting the company line. “Coal keeps the lights on” is the industry’s sound bite these days, propped up on yard signs throughout Kentucky and West Virginia. The talking point is a centerpiece of the coal industry’s efforts to counter what it calls “the war on coal.” The aggressors, supposedly, are President Obama, the Environmental Protection Agency, environmentalists. But tougher environmental and safety regulations aren’t coal’s only problem. The industry is in the dumps due mostly to the rock bottom prices for “natural” gas.

The coal industry has responded by shifting even more to mountaintop removal, now the dominant form of coal extraction in the region. There are nearly 700 surface mines across Appalachia, according to the US Department of Energy; in comparison, there are about 450 underground coalmines there. The mining industry prefers mountaintop removal because of basic economics. Blowing the top off of a mountain requires fewer workers than burrowing beneath one. The strip mining may be more destructive, but, for the mining companies, it’s more profitable.

Even Lusk has his problems with surface mining for coal. “You’re destroying habitat and everything else,” he says. “I don’t like going down the road, looking up and seeing a flat mountain. With underground coal mining, the only thing you’re killing is yourself.”

Not exactly. Once it’s out of the ground, coal becomes even more dangerous. According to theClean Air Task Force, the smog and soot from coal-burning contributes to at least 13,000 premature deaths in the United States every year.

**

John Hanger wants to make sure you know exactly how many people die each year from coal. From 2008 to 2011 Hanger was the Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. His tenure at the department occurred just as the fracking boom was starting to take off in the commonwealth. Now, Hanger is running for governor. When it comes to fracking, he has to do a careful dance.

Hanger sees fracking as an economic boost and an environmental necessity, since burning methane is cleaner than burning oil or coal. But he is not blind to fracking’s impacts.

“When you sign a gas lease on your property, you aren’t bringing a quiet, good neighbor,” Hanger told me. “In the first year there is noise, trucks, some emissions from the diesel. There are a range of impacts even when things go right. It is an industrial process.”

Fracking a well can mean hundreds of truck trips day and night, nonstop, for weeks. Then there’s the toxic wastewater that’s either injected underground, shipped to treatment facilities, put in evaporation ponds, or, in some horrific cases, illegally dumped in creeks, rivers, and storm drains. There’s also air pollution from diesel trucks and gas compressors, fugitive dust, gas flaring, and the evaporation of chemical-laced water when left at the surface.

These are some of the things John Hanger includes on his list of negatives associated with the gas rush. But, he says, that’s just one side of the story. The fracking boom has also been an economic lifesaver, he says.

“Folks without a college education have gotten new income,” Hanger says. “Farmers have been able to keep their farms. There is a lot of new money and wealth coming into communities who desperately need it. There have been jobs created.”

It’s an echo of Lusk, the coal miner, and a repetition of the old argument that jobs should trump environmental protection. Who cares if the jobs are dangerous? Many of the positions pay well, although in the Marcellus Shale skilled, out-of-state workers claim many of the top-dollar gigs. Still, the outsiders eat at local cafes and sleep in area motels and campgrounds.

Locals do nab truck driver jobs, of which there are many, and work as flaggers and security guards. One such worker (who declined to give his name) at a gas well site in West Virginia said he was making $11 an hour. He had a family to support and the job had helped turn his life around. Recently he had been asked, without any advance notice, to work a holiday weekend. He didn’t mind, he said. He was grateful for the work.

But some people whisper darkly about what will happen when the boom goes bust. “We sold everything we had, put everything into this place, so we can pass on the family farm to our grandkids,” says Teresa Jackson. She and her husband, Terry, live on a farm in West Virginia that’s been in Terry’s family since 1930. They now have a drilling rig sitting a few hundred yards from their home. “We’re scared because we don’t know what we’re passing on – contaminated soil and water?”

“They have the right to drill, I’m not even going to argue that,” she says. “But I can’t understand how we should give them the right to put toxic chemicals into our property.”

**

Diane Pitcock moved from Baltimore to Doddridge County, West Virginia in 2005 to get a little peace and quiet. She bought a property with about 100 acres of woods, a log cabin for a home, and a vegetable garden. The family grew much of their own food, raised ducks, spent time shooting target practice.

Then a neighbor leased his land to a gas company. Trees were felled on the ridgetop above their home. Road building, trucks, drilling noise, and lights followed. Now two drilling pads, with a total of six wells, have been constructed. Drilling permits for her area reveal plans for a total of nine well pads and 27 wells.

“We came here for these gravel roads, the rural area,” Pitcock says. “We bought into it. It’s not the same anymore. This is the industrialization of this county.… They took 20 acres for the well pads next to us. It’s not my property, but it is my quality of life.”

Pitcock’s sense of place has been shaken, as has her sense of safety. On July 7 two explosions rocked a well pad above her home at 4 a.m. In the dark and the fog, with fires burning, her family packed their pets in the car, debated including the ducks, and waited to hear if they should hit the road and leave their home behind.

They would learn that five workers were transported to a burn unit in Pittsburgh with serious injuries. Two men died a few weeks later.

**

On the other side of the country, Rick Roles is also intimately familiar with the risks posed by fracking. Roles lives in Garfield County, Colorado, on the Rockies’ Western Slope, above a shale gas formation called the Piceance Basin. Roles, a former oil roughneck, thought signing a gas lease would be a good way to bring in needed money. He didn’t know the price he would ultimately pay.

Roles says his land, 180 acres, is pocked with 19 wells. There are 100 wells within a mile of his house, he says, and within two miles there are also multiple compressor stations as well as a fracking wastewater-treatment facility. This isn’t unusual for residents in his area. In 2004 there were 1,669 active oil and gas wells in Garfield County; by 2012, the number of wells had climbed to more than 10,000.

“We make a little money but the property is destroyed,” Roles says. The Rockies sweep up to the east of his modest home, perched above the Colorado River. It would be a cowboy’s paradise, except that Roles hasn’t been able to keep his animals healthy (or sometimes even alive) since the drilling began. It was bad enough when he lost horses and goats, chronicled others’ birth defects and abnormalities. Then he lost his own health. In 2004, he says, his body seized up, his hands swelled like softballs. He couldn’t pitch hay bales, let alone feed himself. He developed headaches, sinus problems, allergies. He was diagnosed, he says, with peripheral neuropathy – nerve damage that can result from exposure to toxins.

On a windy June morning he stands at a well pad 850 feet below his home. The pad includes production wells and a condensate tank, used to store the water that’s separated from the gas. When enough pressure builds up in the system, it releases gases into the air. Standing beside it makes me dizzy. There is nothing to see in the air, no plume of dirty smoke, but the smell makes my eyes burn, stomach drop, and head spin. It’s a sucker punch I can’t see coming. “This is nothing today,” Roles says drily. “Some days it’s much worse.”

**

Most people have, by now, heard about the Alberta tar sands. The massive deposits of bitumen in Canada’s boreal forests – and the plan to ship the stuff south via the Keystone XL pipeline – have ignited protests across North America. The Canadian tar sands have been called a “carbon time bomb” – dirtier to extract, transport, and burn than conventional crude.

Fewer folks are aware that there are tar sands here in the US, too, and that plans are underway to tap them. A Canadian company with the name US Oil Sands has leased 32,000 acres on Utah’s Tavaputs Plateau to launch the country’s first commercial-scale tar sands mine. Already a 200-acre test mine has been scratched into a hillside, with viscous black bitumen oozing from the ground in places. The company hopes to eventually produce 2,000 barrels a day – significantly smaller than Canadian operations that crank out more than 100,000 barrels a day, but still enough to turn a profit.

Locals aren’t pleased at the prospect. A group called “Utah Tar Sands Resistance” has staged campouts near the site, with carloads of protesters arriving from Salt Lake City and Moab. But US Oil Sands CEO Cameron Todd says his company will be a positive force in the region, contributing an estimated 100 jobs during the 12- to 18-month window of construction, and another 100 positions during the life of the project, which may be anywhere from 15 to 30 years.

“Our impact is less on energy supply and more on environmental sustainability,” Todd says, noting that the company will use a citrus-based solvent that eliminates the need for wastewater tailing ponds and will recycle 95 percent of the water used in operations.

Right now the area looks rugged and wild. Still, there is evidence of the human footprint. Skinny yellow signs mark gas pipelines beside the road. Grazing cattle can be spied before the road climbs to around 8,000 feet at the lip of the plateau. From that height, the clouds are close overhead, and views are long – on a clear day one can see the outline of the red rocks of Arches National Park in Moab, to the south.

How long it remains wild is unknown. It’s not just US Oil Sands that wants a piece of the action. The federal government has approved tar sands development on 132,100 acres of land in Utah, including an area farther south dubbed the “Tar Sands Triangle.” And that’s nothing compared to the 687,000 acres available for oil shale development in Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado. Oil shale is the industry’s term for crude oil or gas that’s locked in sedimentary rock; when heated to 200 °C, the fossil fuels inside can be extracted.

Neal Clark of Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance says that tar sands and oil shale mining is a “dirty and resource-intensive way to develop oil and gas.”

“It doesn’t have any place in Utah,” he says.

**

No matter where I traveled to – Utah, Colorado, Pennsylvania, West Virginia – the disputes about extreme energy always came back to that idea of place, people’s love of where they live. The issue is further complicated by the fact that, in many states, mineral rights have been severed from the surface land. Known as “split estate,” this means that people who own their homes sometimes do not own the minerals underneath them. These homeowners are powerless on their own property.

Many residents also feel powerless in their communities; corporate interests usually trump local concerns. As extreme energy has rippled beyond the coalfields of Appalachia, more places are feeling the burden of the “resource curse.” It has splintered communities – pitted neighbor against neighbor – and revealed a nation sharply divided about our energy future. Social unrest accompanies environmental upheaval.

Gubernatorial candidate Hanger sees it happening in the Marcellus Shale. “Some people say gas drilling has no impacts, or it’s the worst energy choice in the world – both are crazy,” he says. “There are tradeoffs here, that’s the point.”

Yes, some people trade their land for their livelihood – a decent job or a nice royalty check. As a nation we trade the benefits that come with an untouched landscape for the promise of energy independence. But often the dividing lines and tradeoffs are not so clear. Rick Roles, a one-time oil worker, traded his health. Terry and Teresa Jackson aren’t anti-industry – coal and gas companies employ their kids – but neither do they want to trade away their farm. Coal miner Jared Lusk doesn’t want to lose his job or the mountains he loves.

But for so many people that live in extraction areas, the decision is not theirs to make. The decisions about whether to drill or not drill, mine or not mine, belong to someone else. They have little agency in the matter. They simply live next door, downstream, downwind. Diane Pitcock believes West Virginia has been deemed “collateral damage” in our energy quest. Rural America has born the brunt, and the bruise is growing larger. “We know that one day it’s all going to fall in,” Lusk says.

Let’s not wait to see which comes first, economic or environmental disaster. There’s no doubt that as a country we have some tough decisions to make about our energy future. We can follow the thin lines drawn by political parties and take our sides accordingly. Or we can huddle up for some collective soul searching, talk over the fences to our neighbors, consider the science and the community interest, and behave like this may be the most important choice we’ll ever make. Because it is.

Tara Lohan, a senior editor at AlterNet, has just launched the new project Hitting Home, chronicling extreme energy extraction. She is the editor of two books on the global water crisis, including most recently, Water Matters: Why We Need to Act Now to Save Our Most Critical Resource. Follow her on Twitter @TaraLohan.

Immediately on taking office, the newly-elected ultraconservative Abbott Coalition Australian Government has taken an axe to climate change action and the meager steps of its Labor predecessor, in particular axing the expert Australian Climate Commission that has been informing Australians about the latest climate change science. Success in ?tackling climate change? is surely measured in terms of greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution reduction but Australia's Domestic plus Exported GHG pollution is huge and ever-increasing. The Australian Liberal Party-National Party Coalition Government (elected on 7 September 2013) and the Labor Opposition have exactly the same overall GHG pollution policies of a derisory ?5% off 2000 greenhouse gas  pollution by 2020? coupled with unlimited GHG pollution through unlimited coal, gas and iron ore exports.

The newly-elected  ultraconservative Coalition Federal Australian Government under PM Tony Abbott has an effective,  de facto climate change denialist position on man-made climate change. About half the Government are outright climate change deniers and the remainder are de facto deniers in the sense of not supporting effective climate change action. Thus, for example,  the earnest  Coalition Government Minister for the Environment, Greg Hunt, is clearly among those Coalition MPs who do regard  climate change as a problem to be tackled. However several days before the Federal Election, the Coalition revealed an extraordinary climate change denialist position in releasing  its resources and energy policy (see ?The Coalition's Policy for Resources and Energy?: http://www.nationals.org.au/Portals/0/00_Election_00/Coalition%202013%20Election%
20Policy%20%E2%80%93%20Energy%20and%20Resources%20%E2%80%93%20Final.pdf )  that (a) made zero (0) mention of man-made climate change from fossil fuel burning and (b) made zero (0) mention of renewable energy except to propose a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC)  investigation into the climate change denialist furphy of alleged deleterious effects  of wind farms, this ignoring the reality that the NHMRC has already  found that there is ?no published scientific evidence to positively link wind turbines with adverse health effects? (see the NHMRC Report ?Wind farms and human health?: http://www.nhmrc.gov.au/your-health/wind-farms-and-human-health ). In contrast,  an estimated 10,000 Australians die each year due to pollutants from carbon burning (see ?Australian carbon burning-related deaths?: https://sites.google.com/site/yarravalleyclimateactiongroup/2011-carbon-burning ).

Further, the  first acts of the newly elected Abbott Coalition Australian Government were to sack the expert Australian Climate Commission and adumbrate closure of other climate change-related  government bodies, namely the Climate Change Authority and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation . Australian Greens Leader Senator Christine  Milne has stated: ?Today is a black day in the struggle against global warming. [PM] Tony Abbott has axed the Climate Change Commission and sacked its highly respected Commissioners. He has also moved to destroy essential infrastructure like the Climate Change Authority and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. In one swoop, he has demonstrated his contempt for climate science and for the health and wellbeing of future generations?  (see Christine Milne, ?Abbott's crimes against  the climate?, 19 December 2013: http://christine-milne.greensmps.org.au/content/media-releases/abbotts-crimes-against-climate ).

Famed Canadian environmentalist Dr David Suzuki has reportedly accused  PM Tony Abbott of ?criminal negligence? and thence commented further that  ?I don't think I went too far ? what we are seeing is a crime against future generations. There ought to be a legal position on intergenerational crime. If you stand out for a role of leadership and ignore the science on climate change, I think that's wilful blindness? (Oliver Milman, ?David Suzuki accuses Tony Abbott of ?wilful blindness? to climate change?, The Guardian, 24 September 2013: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/sep/24/david-suzuki-accuses-tony-abbott ).

However ultraconservative Australian PM Tony Abbott has not stopped there. His Minister for the Environment,  Greg Hunt, has announced a policy of  fast-tracking of environmental approvals for mining in Australia and those impacting the endangered, World Heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef in particular. Further, he Coalition  Government  is making moves to ban citizen action against climate criminal corporations. Thus the progressive, pro-environment, pro-human rights public advocacy and petitioning group Get-Up (the Australian equivalent of Avaaz) has written the following message to its  members: ?The Abbott Government is making aggressive moves to silence our voices and go after the places we cherish. Headline news in The Australian [owned by the Murdoch media empire] clearly spells out the fight ahead of us: (1) First, the Coalition announces it will "fast-track" plans for future development of major coal, iron ore and gas regions surrounding the Great Barrier Reef, cutting what they term "green tape". (2) And then, yesterday's shocking story that the government is already pre-empting our future campaigning. They are considering legislation to remove our right to speak up against companies with poor environmental records.?

Indeed new Australian PM Tony Abbott's 4 key policies to (1) ?stop the boats?,  (2) ?scrap the carbon tax?,  (3) ?build the roads? and (4) ?get the budget back into the black? had already failed before the Coalition Government began. Thus (1) Australia's giant neighbour Indonesia strongly objects to potential  violation of its sovereignty by the Coalition's ?stop the boats? policies; (2) via its Direct Action plan of subsidizing polluters not to pollute the Coalition effectively proposes  an implicit  Carbon Tax that is maximally 5 times bigger than Labor's in terms of dollars per tonne CO2-equivalent;  (3) in the context of a worsening climate crisis, investing public money into energy inefficient highways rather than into energy efficient railways is dangerous and expensive incompetence at best; and (4)  fossil fuel burning carries an enormous debt for future generations and coal exports over the next 3 years  under the Coalition will entrench a carbon debt of  $300 billion to $450 billion in today's Australian dollars for future generations, an appalling example of Coalition ignorance, incompetence, corruption, intergenerational inequity and intergenerational injustice (for details see Gideon Polya, ?New Abbott  Coalition Australian Government. 4 policy failures already?, MWC News: http://mwcnews.org/focus/analysis/31479-abbott-coalition.html ) .

In 2009 the German Advisory Council on Climate Change (WBGU) determined that for a 75% chance of avoiding a catastrophic 2 degree C temperature rise, the World must pollute less than 600 Gt CO2 (600 billion tonnes CO2) between 2010 and essentially zero emissions in 2050. The Australian Climate Commission (now disbanded in one of the first acts of the incoming Coalition Government) has come to the same conclusion (see WBGU, ?Solving the climate dilemma: the budget approach?: http://www.ecoequity.org/2009/10/solving-the-climate-dilemma-the-budget-approach/ and  Australian Climate Commission, ?The critical decade 2013: a summary of climate change science, risks and responses?, 2013, p7: http://climatecommission.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/The-Critical-Decade-2013-Summary_lowres.pdf  ).

This means that the "fair share" of this  global terminal greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution budget of 600 Gt  CO2 (600 billion tonnes CO2) for Australia (population 22.9 million in 2012 as compared to a World population of 7,010 million ) is 600 billion tonnes CO2  x 22.9 million/7010 million  = 1.960 billion tonnes CO2 = 1,960 million tonnes CO2.

From Australian Treasury, Australian Bureau of Agricultural  and Resource Economics (ABARE), and US Energy Information Administration (US EIA)  data, and assuming an 11% annual growth in iron ore exports, 2.4% annual growth in coal exports and 9% annual growth in gas exports, Australia's Domestic and Exported greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution is as follows (million tonnes CO2-e or Mt CO2-e). The data are based on fossil fuel combustion and ignore fugitive emissions due leakage of gas (mainly  methane, CH4) from coal mines and in coal-seam gas (CSG) production.

2000: 565 (Domestic) + 505 (coal exports) + 17 (LNG exports) + 105 (iron ore exports) = 1,192.

2009: 600 (Domestic) + 784 (coal exports) + 31 (LNG exports) + 97 (iron ore exports) = 1,512.

2010: 578 (Domestic) + 803 (coal exports) + 34 (LNG exports) + 293 (iron ore exports) = 1,708.

2020: 621 (Domestic) + 1,039 (black coal exports) + 80 (LNG exports) + 59 (brown coal exports) + 772 (iron ore exports) = 2,571.

If Australia manages to reach its derisory target of ?5% off 2000 Domestic greenhouse gas  pollution by 2020? (noting that the plans of the previous Labor Government envisaged that this could only be achieved by buying cheap ?GHG credits? from overseas), then Australia's 2020 Domestic plus Exported GHG pollution in Mt CO2-e would be:

2020: 537 (Domestic) + 1,039 (black coal exports) + 80 (LNG exports) + 59 (brown coal exports) + 772 (iron ore exports) = 2,487.

Australia's annual domestic greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution was 578 million tonnes CO2-e (CO2-equivalent) in 2010 (this figure taking into account not just CO2 but other GHGs excluding water (H2O) that were emitted e.g. methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) derived from land use). Accordingly, relative to 2010, Australia has 1,960/578 = 3.4 years at this rate to use up its ?fair share? of the world's terminal GHG pollution budget.  

However simple ?cause and effect? means that we must also consider the GHG impact of Australia's huge coal, natural gas and iron ore exports to the GHG pollution of the one common atmosphere of all countries.  Thus, if Australia left it all in the ground then this material would not be used to generate GHG pollution of the atmosphere.

Australia's Domestic plus Exported GHG pollution in 2010 was 1,708 million tonnes CO2-e, this being made up (in million tonnes of CO2-e) of   578 (Domestic) + 803 (coal exports) + 34 (LNG exports) + 293 (iron ore exports) (see "2011 Climate Change Course": https://sites.google.com/site/300orgsite/2011-climate-change-course  ) and hence relative to 2010 Australia had 1,960/1,708 = 1.1 years to get to zero emissions i.e. by the middle of 2011.

Australia had thus by 2011 already used up its ?fair share? of the world's  terminal GHG pollution budget and is now stealing the entitlement of all of the countries in the world. For a detailed analysis see ?Shocking analysis by country of years left to zero emissions?, Green Blog, 1 August 2011: http://www.green-blog.org/2011/08/01/shocking-analysis-by-country-of-years-left-to-zero-emissions/ .

However, it gets worse. Australia has huge reserves of black coal, brown coal, natural gas (conventional gas and unconventional gas such as shale gas and coal seam gas or CSG) and iron ore (which contributes  to GHG pollution when processed industrially). The Australian bipartisan policy of unlimited coal, gas and iron ore exports means that, given Australia's huge resources,  Australia is set to exceed the WBGU's and Australian Climate Commission's terminal GHG pollution budget of 600 billion tonnes CO2-equivalent by a factor of three (3) (the World is set to exceed this budget by a factor of 5) (see Gideon Polya, ? Australia 's huge coal, gas & iron ore exports threaten Planet?, Countercurrents, 15 May, 2012: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya150512.htm ).

What can decent people do?

To summarize, the German WBGU and the Australian Climate Commission have estimated that no more than 600 billion tonnes of CO2 can be emitted between 2010 and zero emissions in 2050 if the world is to have a 75% chance of avoiding a catastrophic 2C temperature  rise. A climate criminal Australia   used up its "fair share" of the world's terminal greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution budget of 600 billion tonnes CO2-e in 2011 . The Australian bipartisan policy of unlimited coal, gas and iron ore exports means that, given Australia's huge resources,  Australia is set to exceed the WBGU's and Australian Climate Commission's terminal GHG pollution budget of 600 billion tonnes CO2-equivalent by a factor of three (3) (the World is set to exceed this budget by a factor of 5).

Australian politically correct racism (PC racism) asserts love for humanity while being disproportionately involved in war crimes and climate crimes. As adumbrated by conservative climate change economist  Professor Ross Garnaut, the world will eventually force Australia to take action on climate change. An increasingly  climate change-threatened world will eventually respond to Australia 's dog-in-the?manger climate criminality through Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), Green Tariffs, Sporting Boycotts, International Court of Justice (ICJ) litigations and International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutions. Decent people will respond to the worsening climate crisis by (a) informing others and (b) urging sanctions against all people, politicians, parties,  corporations and countries (notably Australia , Canada and the US ) involved in disproportionate deadly pollution of  our one common atmosphere.

Dr James Hansen (former head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York and adjunct Professor at 98-Nobel-Laureate Columbia University) as has demanded criminal prosecution of corporation officials who are complicit in climate change-connected mass mortality through  knowingly  misleading the public about man-made climate change: ?Fossil fuel reservoirs are finite, which is the main reason that prices are rising. We must move beyond fossil fuels eventually. Solution of the climate problem requires that we move to carbon-free energy promptly. Special interests have blocked the transition to our renewable energy future. Instead of moving heavily into renewable energies, fossil fuel companies choose to spread doubt about global warming, just as tobacco companies discredited the link between smoking and cancer. Methods are sophisticated, including funding to help shape school textbook discussions of global warming. CEOs of fossil energy companies know what they are doing and are aware of the long-term consequences of continued business as usual. In my opinion, these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature. But the conviction of ExxonMobil and Peabody Coal CEOs will be no consolation if we pass on a runaway climate to our children. Humanity would be impoverished by ravages of continually shifting shorelines and intensification of regional climate extremes. Loss of countless species would leave a more desolate planet? (see James Hansen, ?Guest opinion: global warming twenty years later?, Worldwatch Institute: http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5798 ).   

One notes that while free speech is crucial for scientific and scholarly investigation and for rational risk management to maximize societal safety, wilful lying associated with consequent grievous harm is punishable under law.  On a present visit to Australia , famous environmentalist  Professor David Suzuki has put a similar position: ?I think there is a category called wilful blindness. Our problem is we have no means of holding our so-called leaders - people we elect to political office to lead us into the future - we have no way to keep them accountable, except booting them out of office. But the reverberations of what they do or do not do today are rippling far beyond the coming years. There will be generational impacts. Now, if you have people who stand up to take positions of leadership and they deliberately suppress or ignore information vital to making an informed decision, I think that's wilful blindness, and wilful blindness, I understand, is a legal entity that you can sue people for.? personally I think that there is a great deal of wilful blindness and it ought to be pointed out in some way, yes.? I believe what is going on now is criminal, our activity, because it is a crime against future generations and there ought to be a legal position of intergenerational crime and I think there is criminal negligence.? David Suzuki was equally blunt in relation to pessimist inaction in the face of political unresponsiveness: ?Well, I think that you have no choice. If you don't do anything, then you assure that you're going to go the negative way. We have to get involved ? Get off your ass and let's get something done about this?(see ?An audience with David Suzuki?, ABC TV, Q&A, 23 September, 2013: http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s3841115.htm ).

 The Synthesis Report of the March 2009 Copenhagen Scientific Climate Change Conference has similarly concluded that ?Inaction is inexcusable? (Synthesis Report of the March 2009 Copenhagen Scientific Climate Change Conference: http://climatecongress.ku.dk/pdf/synthesisreport ). Similarly in a 2010 Open Letter signed by 255 members of the prestigious US National Academy of Sciences, including 11 Nobel Laureates stated : ?Delay is not an option? (2010 Open Letter by 255 members of the US National Academy of Sciences, ?Open Letter: climate change and the integrity of science?, Guardian, 6 May 2010: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/06/climate-science-open-letter ). Dr James Hansen when asked if it is possible to avert the climate crisis replied ?Absolutely. It is possible ? if we give politicians a cold, hard slap in the face? Are we going to stand up and give global politicians a hard slap in the face, to make them face the truth? It will take a lot of us ? probably in the streets. Or are we going to let them continue to kid themselves and us and cheat our children and grandchildren? Intergenerational inequity is a moral issue? (see James Hansen, ?It's  possible to avert the climate crisis?? Countercurrents, 29 November 2009: http://www.countercurrents.org/hansen291109.htm ).

Decent Australians, Canadians and Americans in particular must do everything they can to oppose the climate criminal  policies of their climate criminal governments and major parties, noting that Australia, Canada and the US are world leaders in annual per capita GHG pollution (see ?Climate genocide?: https://sites.google.com/site/climategenocide/ ). Thus decent Australians  should urge everyone they can to oppose the climate criminal policies of the functionally climate change denialist Abbott Coalition Australian Government and should urge Australian Labor Party members and Parliamentary Labor Caucus MPs to support the more progressive Anthony Albanese in the forthcoming ballots for the  position of Leader of the Opposition Australian Labor Party and against the right-wing candidate Bill Shorten (who was a key player in both the 2010 and 2013 Coups against successive democratically elected Labor Prime Ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, respectively). Members of the Australian Climate Commission sacked by the new Coalition Government have vowed to continue to inform Australia on a voluntary basis as an Australian Climate Council.  Top scientists  advise that ?Inaction is inexcusable? and ?Delay is not an option?  ? we must do everything we can to sensibly and peacefully help save Humanity and the Biosphere.

Dr Gideon Polya has been teaching science students at a major Australian university for 4 decades. He published some 130 works in a 5 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text "Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds" (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London , 2003). He has published ?Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950? (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ); see also his contributions ?Australian complicity in Iraq mass mortality? in ?Lies, Deep Fries & Statistics? (edited by Robyn Williams, ABC Books, Sydney, 2007: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s1445960.htm ) and ?Ongoing Palestinian Genocide? in ?The Plight of the Palestinians (edited by William Cook, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2010: http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/4047-the-plight-of-the-palestinians.html ). He has published a revised and updated 2008 version of his 1998 book ?Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History? (see: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/ ) as biofuel-, globalization- and climate-driven global food price increases threaten a greater famine catastrophe than the man-made famine in British-ruled India that killed 6-7 million Indians in the ?forgotten? World War 2 Bengal Famine (see recent BBC broadcast involving Dr Polya, Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen and others: http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/history/social-economic-history/listen-the-bengal-famine ). When words fail one can say it in pictures - for images of Gideon Polya's huge paintings for the Planet, Peace, Mother and Child see: http://sites.google.com/site/artforpeaceplanetmotherchild/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/gideonpolya/ .

After an unusually cold summer in the northernmost latitudes, Arctic sea ice appears to have reached its annual minimum summer extent for 2013 on Sept. 13, the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado in Boulder has reported. Analysis of satellite data by NSIDC and NASA showed that the sea ice extent shrunk to 1.97 million square miles (5.10 million square kilometers).

This year's sea ice extent is substantially higher than last year's record low minimum. On Sept.16, 2012, Arctic sea ice reached its smallest extent ever recorded by satellites at 1.32 million square miles (3.41 million square kilometers). That is about half the size of the average minimum extent from 1981 to 2010.

This summer's minimum is still the sixth lowest extent of the satellite record and is 432,000 square miles (1.12 million square kilometers) lower than the 1981-2010 average, roughly the size of Texas and California combined.

The 2013 summertime minimum extent is in line with the long-term downward trend of about 12 percent per decade since the late 1970s, a decline that has accelerated after 2007. This year's rebound from 2012 does not disagree with this downward trend and is not a surprise to scientists.

"I was expecting that this year would be higher than last year," said Walt Meier, a glaciologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "There is always a tendency to have an uptick after an extreme low; in our satellite data, the Arctic sea ice has never set record low minimums in consecutive years."

Depiction of Arctic sea ice on Sept. 12, 2013 , the day before NSIDC estimated sea ice extent hit its annual minimum, with a line showing the 30-year average minimum extent in yellow. The data was provided by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency from their GCOM-W1 satellite's AMSR2 instrument. Image Credit: NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio/Cindy Starr

The ice cap covering the Arctic Ocean shrinks and expands with the passing of the seasons, melting in the summer and refreezing during the long, frigid Arctic winter. This year, cooler weather in the spring and summer led to a late start of the melt season and overall less melt.

This year, Arctic temperatures were 1.8 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit (1 to 2.5 degrees Celsius) lower than average, according to NASA's Modern Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications, a merging of observations and a modeled forecast. The colder temperatures were in part due to a series of summer cyclones. In August 2012, a big storm caused havoc on the Arctic Ocean 's icy cover, but this summer's cyclones have had the opposite effect: under cloudier conditions, surface winds spread the ice over a larger area.

"The trend with decreasing sea ice is having a high-pressure area in the center of the Arctic, which compresses the ice pack into a smaller area and also results in clear skies, which enhances melting due to the sun," said Richard Cullather, an atmospheric scientist at Goddard and at the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center of the University of Maryland, College Park, Md. "This year, there was low pressure, so the cloudiness and the winds associated with the cyclones expanded the ice."

An area of the Arctic sea ice pack roughly northeast of the New Siberian Islands, captured by multiple orbits of the MODIS instrument on NASA's Terra satellite on Sept. 13, 2013. Sea ice dominates the lower left half of the image; open ocean and cloud formations can be seen in the upper right. Image Credit: Image courtesy NASA Worldview

The remaining Arctic sea ice cover is much thinner on average than it was years ago. Satellite imagery, submarine sonar measurements, and data collected from NASA's Operation IceBridge, an airborne survey of polar ice, indicate that the Arctic sea ice thickness is as much as 50 percent thinner than it was in previous decades, going from an average thickness of 12.5 feet (3.8 meters) in 1980 to 6.2 feet (1.9 meters) in recent years. The thinning is due to the loss of older, thicker ice, which is being replaced by thinner seasonal ice.

Most of the Arctic Ocean used to be covered by multiyear ice, or ice that has survived at least two summers and is typically 10 to 13 feet (3 to 4 meters) thick. This older ice has declined at an even faster rate than younger ice and is now largely relegated to a strip along the northern coast of Greenland . The rest of the Arctic Ocean is dominated by first year ice, or ice that formed over the previous winter and is only 3 to 7 feet (1 to 2 meters) thick.

"Thinner ice melts completely at a faster rate than thicker ice does, so if the average thickness of Arctic sea ice goes down, it's more likely that the extent of the summer ice will go down as well," said Joey Comiso, senior scientist at Goddard and coordinating lead author of the Cryosphere Observations chapter of the upcoming report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "At the rate we're observing this decline, it's very likely that the Arctic 's summer sea ice will completely disappear within this century."

Comiso added that the slight rebound in the 2013 sea ice minimum extent is consistent with a rebound in the multiyear ice cover observed last winter.

An image of an area of the Arctic sea ice pack well north of Alaska, captured by the MODIS instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite on Sept. 13, 2013. A cloud front can be seen in the lower left, and dark areas indicate regions of open water between sea ice formations. Image Credit: Image courtesy NASA Worldview

"The character of the ice is fundamentally different: It's thinner, more broken up, and thus more susceptible to melt completely," Meier said. "This year, the cool temperatures saved more of the ice. However, the fact that as much of the ice melted as it did is an indication of how much the ice cover had changed. If we had this weather with the sea ice of 20 years ago, we would have had an above-normal extent this year."

The sea ice minimum extent analysis produced at NASA Goddard ? one of many satellite-based scientific analyses of sea ice cover ? is compiled from passive microwave data from NASA's Nimbus 7 satellite, which operated from late October 1978 to August 1987, and the U.S. Department of Defense's Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, which has been used to extend the Nimbus 7 sea ice record onwards from August 1987. The record began in October 1978.

US Gov., NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory / California Institute of Technology, Earth Science Communications Team, Global Climate Change , Sept 23, 2013, http://climate.nasa.gov/news/986

Sophie Yeo of Responding to Climate Change reports [1]:

The leading thinkers on climate have launched a declaration on September 23, intending to spur action towards the creation of an ambitious international agreement in 2015.

The Declaration outlines five priorities for securing a just and sustainable future, which includes: empowering those most affected by climate change, reducing emissions, establishing a new investment model, enforcing accountability, and building strong legal frameworks.

Representatives from politics, science, business, civil society and academia have come together under the auspices of the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the Mary Robinson Foundation – Climate Justice (MRFCJ) to write the Declaration.

Signatories to the declaration include the former prime minister of Mozambique Luisa Dias Diogo and former president of Chile Ricardo Lagos. Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, and Andrew Steer, president of the WRI, have also put their names to the document.

All are members of a High Level Advisory Committee, assembled by the MRFCJ and the WRI, to stimulate an influential dialogue on the issue of climate justice.

“The time for radical leadership on climate change is now. With 2015 set as the deadline for both a new climate agreement and the post-2015 development agenda, we are at the point in human development when we need to act to protect,” said Mary Robinson.

“The rights of the most vulnerable in society are already undermined by climate change and this injustice must be addressed now. Equally for the sake of generations to come, it is our duty, as citizens of the world, to realize a new model of sustainable growth and development that is supported by strong legal frameworks.”

The report comes at a busy time in the climate change calendar, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change due to publish their potentially game-changing report at the end of this week. The UN General Assembly is also currently taking place in New York, where Ban Ki-moon is to call leaders to come together for a high level climate change summit in 2014.

In six weeks’ time, the UN climate change body will meet in Poland to attempt to make headway on setting up a framework in which a legally binding global agreement can be met in Paris in 2015.

IPCC’s tough message

The world must prepare for a strong message on climate change as leaders meet in Stockholm to finalize report.

In another report Ed King said [2]:

Governments will assess the UN’s latest climate science report this week amid fears the world is running out of time to address the issue.

The latest study from the IPCC is likely to suggest the release of half a trillion tonnes of carbon from fossil fuels in the coming decades will warm the planet to dangerous levels.

On September 23, envoys from 195 states kick off a four-day summit run by the IPCC in Stockholm, to examine the findings of the UN body’s latest report, named AR5.

“It is extremely likely that human activities have caused more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature since the 1950s,” a June draft of the report says.

It is also likely to suggest sea levels could rise as high as 3ft by 2100, predict the Arctic could face ice-free summers and warn that oceans are acidifying.

In the past century the planet has warmed by 0.8C, while this year the concentration of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere hit the 400 parts per million for the first time in human history.

Delegates will have to collectively approve the 30-page Summary for Policymakers before the study is published on Friday, ending several years of work by 840 authors, and thousands more reviewers.

A vital time

Writing in the Guardian, former World Bank Chief Economist Lord Stern, who analysed the costs of a warming world for the UK government in 2006, says AR5 will demonstrate how collective dithering has left nations facing a tough challenge.

“It will also underline the fact that delay is making things much worse, both because the ratchet effect of emissions is causing a rapid accumulation of greenhouse gases and because we are locking in our dependence on the fossil fuels that cause the problem,” he says.

“Current action is much too weak to reduce emissions by enough to avoid a significant probability of the global average temperature rising by more than 2C above its pre-industrial level by the end of this century.”

The IPCC has published four reports since its inception in 1988. The first in 1990 involved 97 authors – this time 840 have chipped in.

The 2013 vintage is likely to be the strongest of the collection, with scientists maintaining they are now 95-100% certain that humans have caused the majority of climate change since the 1950s.

Envoys will be expected to work through the politically crucial summary line by line, a laborious process that draws to the surface tensions over what addressing climate change will mean for different countries.

In 2007, the USA, China and Saudi Arabia were blamed for making the most objections.

Difficult issues

This time round, the debate over how much carbon dioxide the world can afford to spew into the atmosphere is likely to prove controversial, as are theories over why a long term trend of warming has slowed over the past 15 years.

Former IPCC chief Bob Watson told RTCC it is vital this issue is tackled head on, otherwise climate doubters would claim a cover up.

“The deniers are saying we’ve obviously got the theory wrong, because greenhouse gases are still increasing – which they are, at a rapid rate – so why isn’t the temperature responding?”, he said.
“Therefore, the IPCC must address difficult issues like this, absolutely.”

Drafts of the report suggest the warming slowdown could be attributed to variability in the overall climate system, cooling effects from volcanic eruptions, and a decline in solar activity.

Leaked documents seen by the AP news agency reveals the USA has called for scientists to add a “leading hypothesis” that the decline is linked to the absorption of heat in the oceans.

Germany has called for the slowdown reference to be deleted, arguing that 10-15 years is too short a span to be concerned about, given climate impacts are usually analysed over longer periods.

Belgium has concerns over graphs using 1998 as a start date, given it was a particularly warm year, meaning any trajectory starting from there would look flat.

Future ambition

The political importance of AR5 is hard to overstate. In just over two years’ time, governments are scheduled to meet in Paris to agree a global emissions reduction deal.

A strong message from climate science is seen by many observers as critical if those negotiations, which are sluggish at best, will achieve an agreement ambitious enough to avert dangerous levels of warming.

Former UN climate chief Michael Zammit Cuatajar told RTCC he believes how world leaders respond to the report will be an “important determinant of ambition”.

The IPCC’s current chief Rajendra Pachauri told a recent conference call it would provide enough information to ensure “rational people” will see that action is needed.

UN climate talks this November in Warsaw will be looked at closely for an early sign of that commitment.

They are expected to deliver a framework for an emissions treaty, and assurances from rich nations on their future climate finance contributions.

Five minutes to midnight

IPCC chief Pachauri said: Climate fight is now “five minutes to midnight”.

Humanity has ‘ignored and disregarded’ debts to nature says climate science chief in withering attack on governments

Speaking in Delhi a few weeks ago, he said: “We have five minutes before midnight,” arguing that governments had historically avoided taking responsibility for global warming.

“We may utilize the gifts of nature just as we choose, but in our books the debits are always equal to the credits.

“May I submit that humanity has completely ignored, disregarded and been totally indifferent to the debits? Today we have the knowledge to be able to map out the debits and to understand what we have done to the condition of this planet.”

He added: “We cannot isolate ourselves from anything that happens in any part of this planet. It will affect all of us in some way or the other.”
Pachauri is head of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Source:

[1] September 23, 2013, “World leaders release climate justice declaration in New York”,
http://www.rtcc.org/2013/09/23/world-leaders-demand-climate-action-as-un-general-assembly-begins/

[2] RTCC, September 23, 2013, “IPCC set to issue governments with tough climate change warning”,
http://www.rtcc.org/2013/09/23/ipcc-set-to-issue-governments-with-tough-climate-change-warning/

The International Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report on global warming – dubbed AR5 – is due out in 2014, but information is leaking out already, and once again, it is likely to be outdated on the day it’s released.

Worse, it will substantially understate both the rate and pace of warming, and it’s consequences. Here’s why.

Outdated on day of release: The IPCC process virtually assures that all the research used in the report will be several years old. Since it only uses peer reviewed work and a consensus process, it has a long lead-time and a least common denominator data set. The latest research and any research that challenges established theory is left on the cutting room floor.

For example, in the AR 4 – released in 2007 -- the IPCC forecast sea level rise to be, at most, 59 centimeters. Conventional wisdom up to that time suggested that continental ice sheets took thousands of years to melt. But well before that report was issued, research had revealed that dynamic forces were causing these ice sheets to melt much faster. As a result, even as the AR4 was being released, some researchers were forecasting sea level increases of as much as 3 meters – nearly 5 times the worst-case AR4 estimate.

These excessively conservative forecasts are baked into the IPCC process. In fact, some suggest that's the point of the IPCC – to take control of the scientific debate out of the hands of scientists and turn it over to governments.

Ignoring known feedbacks: But that’s only part of the reason the IPCC reports have been out-of-date-on-date-of–issue: for the most part, they still ignore the effects of positive feedbacks on warming.

For example, the AR 5 will not consider the potential warming from methane released from melting permafrost and volatizing clathrates. Yet we know this could add more than 2F to projected warming by 2100.

Indeed, when we look at the geologic record, we see sea level increases, extinctions and climate shifts that are at or beyond our most extreme predictions from models. The amount of carbon causing these geologic events was comparable to what we’re releasing now, but we’re releasing it far faster than occurred in even the worst of these ancient warmings.

In short, empirical evidence suggests today’s worst-case scenarios are tomorrow’s most-likely outcomes. The same is true when we do ex-ante analysis of modeling done in the early stages of climate research. Today’s reality goes well beyond even the most dire past predictions.

Feedbacks probably explain why.

There are at least 12 significant feedbacks that will have a substantial effect on the rate and pace of warming. Yet feedbacks are often too complex to fully characterize, let alone model. Yet their effects are serious. For example just 3 of these feedbacks could add as much as 4.5 degrees to the warming forecasts for 2100.

The first is a result of decreases in sulfur aerosols from phytoplankton, as the seas become more acidic and these critters begin to die off. Sulfur aerosols are known to moderate solar gain and mitigate global warming. This could increase warming by close to 1F by 2100.

Extreme weather events could add another 1.5 F since they effect the Earth’s ability to sequester human emissions and in some cases increase those emissions directly.

Add these to the 2 F expected from methane releases – a conservative number if one compares the results of similar events in the geologic record – and these 3 feedbacks alone could add 4.5 F to our worst-case projections for 2100.

And of course, warming doesn’t simply stop in 2100, merely because we stop modeling beyond that. It continues and accelerates, and, unchecked, becomes self-reinforcing and irreversible. We’re already locked into thousands of years of sea level rise from the carbon we’ve put into the system to date.

Using Nuance to misinform: To the untrained or uncritical eye – which is to say most of the press which has been gutting cutting back on environmental coverage -- the IPCC’s AR5 report could also be seen to reinforce the idea that global warming is “slowing down” or “stopped.”

The AR5 notes an “observed reduction in surface warming.” The key word here is surface warming. The reality is, at the moment, because of oscillations in the Pacific, more heat is being absorbed by deeper ocean layers. The oceans account for about 93% of all warming, so a slow down in the rate of surface warming is relatively insignificant. On net, the Earth is still warming and, if anything, the rate of warming has accelerated.

But deniers will be seizing on that phrase and trumpeting it all over their anti-science networks. And credulous reporters will repeat it endlessly to be “balanced” and to “cover the controversy.”

Meanwhile, in the real world, the Earth will continue to hurtle toward a rendezvous with pre-historic tragedies like the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.

Bottom line: The future we’re fashioning is completely incompatible with the civilization we’ve built, and the IPCC slow-walks , understates and outright ignores much of the science that screams at us to do something about it.

John Atcheson is author of the novel, A Being Darkly Wise, an eco-thriller and Book One of a Trilogy centered on global warming. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the San Jose Mercury News and other major newspapers. Atcheson’s book reviews are featured on Climateprogess.org.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Mother Agnes Mariam el-Salib

There is proof the footage of the alleged chemical attack in Syria was fabricated, Mother Agnes Mariam el-Salib, mother superior of St. James Monastery in Qara , Syria , told RT. She says she is about to submit her findings to the UN.

Mother Agnes, a catholic nun, who has been living in Syria for 20 years and has been reporting actively on what has been going on in the war-ravaged country, says she carefully studied the video featuring allegedly victims of the chemical weapons attack in the Syrian village of Guta in August and now questions its authenticity. 

In her interview with RT, Mother Agnes doubts so much footage could have been taken in so little time, and asks where parents of the supposedly dead children are. She promises to send her report to the UN. 

The nun is indignant with the world media for apparently turning a blind eye to the Latakia massacre by rebel extremists, which left 500 civilians including women and children dead.

Russia 's Foreign Ministry has called on the international community to pay attention to revelations made by Mother Agnes Mariam el-Salib. 

RT: The United States has used internet photos and video footage of the supposed chemical weapons attack in Eastern Guta to build a case against the Syrian government. Have you been able to look at these files? What do you have to say about them?

Mother Agnes: I have carefully studied the footage, and I will present a written analysis on it a bit later. I maintain that the whole affair was a frame-up. It had been staged and prepared in advance with the goal of framing the Syrian government as the perpetrator. 

The key evidence is that Reuters made these files public at 6.05 in the morning. The chemical attack is said to have been launched between 3 and 5 o'clock in the morning in Guta. How is it even possible to collect a dozen different pieces of footage, get more than 200 kids and 300 young people together in one place, give them first aid and interview them on camera, and all that in less than three hours? Is that realistic at all? As someone who works in the news industry, you know how long all of it would take.

The bodies of children and teenagers we see in that footage ? who were they? What happened to them? Were they killed for real? And how could that happen ahead of the gas attack? Or, if they were not killed, where did they come from? Where are their parents? How come we don't see any female bodies among all those supposedly dead children? 

I am not saying that no chemical agent was used in the area ? it certainly was. But I insist that the footage that is now being peddled as evidence had been fabricated in advance. I have studied it meticulously, and I will submit my report to the UN Human Rights Commission based in Geneva .

RT: Recently you've visited Latakia and the adjacent areas; you've talked to the eyewitnesses to the massacre of civilians carried out in Latakia by Jabhat al-Nusra. What can you tell us about it?  

MA: What I want to ask first of all is how the international community can ignore the brutal killing spree in Latakia on Laylat al-Qadr early in the morning of August 5, an attack that affected more than 500 people, including children, women and the elderly. They were all slaughtered. The atrocities committed exceed any scale. But there was close to nothing about it in the international mass media. There was only one small article in ?The Independent?, I believe. 

We sent our delegation to these villages, and our people had a look at the situation on-site, talked to the locals, and most importantly ? talked to the survivors of the massacre. 

I don't understand why the Western media apply double standards in this case ? they talk about mass murder that the use of chemical weapons resulted in non-stop, but they keep quiet about the Latakia massacre.

RT: Do you know anything about the fate of hostages captured in Latakia?

MA: In the village of Estreba they massacred all the residents and burnt down their houses. In the village of al-Khratta almost all the 37 locals were killed. Only ten people were able to escape. 

A total of twelve Alawite villages were subjected to this horrendous attack. That was a true slaughterhouse. People were mutilated and beheaded. There is even a video that shows a girl being dismembered alive ? alive! ? by a frame saw. The final death toll exceeded 400, with 150 to 200 people taken hostage. Later some of the hostages were killed, their deaths filmed. 

At the moment we are looking for the hostages and negotiating their release with the militants, but so far we haven't managed to achieve that.

RT: We often hear reports of Christians being persecuted by the militants. Just the day before yesterday there was an attack in the village of Maaloula , where the majority of population is Christian. Are Christians in Syria facing grave danger?

MA: Everyone in Syria is facing grave danger. There was a case of Muslim religious leaders being kidnapped and beheaded. They were humiliated and tortured. Ismailis, the druze, Christians ? people from all parts of Syrian society ? are being mass murdered. I would like to say that if these butchers didn't have international support, no one would have dared to cross the line. But today, unfortunately, the violation of human rights and genocide in Syria is covered up on the international level. I demand the international community stops assessing the situation in Syria in accordance with the interests of a certain group of great powers. The Syrian people are being killed. They fall victim to contractors, who are provided with weapons and sent to Syria to kill as many people as possible. The truth is, everywhere in Syria people are being kidnapped, tortured, raped and robbed. These crimes remain unpunished, because the key powers chose international terrorism as a way to destroy sovereign states. They've done it to other countries. And they will just keep doing it if the international community doesn't say ?Enough!?

RT: You've managed to get hold of some sensitive information. Does this make you fear for your life as someone who keeps documents that may compromise the militants? Has anyone threatened you?

MA: You are right. I do get threatened. They are trying to discredit me. I know there is a book coming out soon in France that labels me as a criminal who kills people. But any believer should first and foremost trust their conscience, their belief in God, and that will help them save innocent lives. I don't care much about my own life. My life is no more precious than that of any Syrian child, whose body could be used as evidence to justify wrongdoing. This is the biggest crime ever perpetrated in history.

RT: What should the Syrians do to stop the tragedy they are going through?

MA: The Syrians themselves can do nothing to stop it. They can only rely on the international community, friendly nations, world powers, such as Russia , China , and India . With a lot of enthusiasm we did welcome the news that the British parliament voted against the participation of their country in the possible war against Syria . There is a terrorist war going on against Syria right now. The international community and Syria 's friends should join forces and say: Enough! And they need to use every opportunity to do that. Otherwise this threat Syria is facing now will turn into a threat to universal peace.

RT: What should the Vatican and other hubs of Christianity do to put an end to this tragedy?

MA: The Pope says he has no planes, no bombs, and no armed forces. Instead, he has the power of the truth, and the truth he has told. There are messages coming from everywhere in the world urging against a military intervention in Syria . Those who want to hear them will. The Pope, the patriarchs, Nobel Prize winners, including women, keep saying the same in unison: Let's stop fighting. No conflict can be solved by military means. Stop adding fuel to the flame!
All the prominent public figures in the world have risen to speak against the war. Everyone has spoken their mind, but the US prefers to turn a deaf ear. The world public opinion has turned against the US . It's the first time in history that America is alone. They are claiming that they are backed by ten countries. But I insist they aren't, because the people of these countries disagree with their governments. Even the American people disagree with their government.

RT: Do you believe that this tragedy will end and Syria will remain a homeland for all Syrians, regardless of their ethnical or religious identity?

MA: I'm not Syrian myself, but I've been living in Syria for 20 years. I'd like to remind everyone that Damascus is the most ancient capital in the world. I would like to remind everyone that Syria is the cradle of civilization. I would like to remind everyone that this is the holy land that gave birth to the main world religions. What is happening in Syria should serve as a lesson for everyone. I mean that in existential rather than political sense. I am convinced that with God's help the Syrian people will be able to remain strong, heal their wounds, reconcile and chase out all the foreign mercenaries and terrorists. I believe there will be peace in Syria . But for that we need help from the international community.

PHOTO BY David Dodge/The Pembina Institute View Gallery

A Syncrude Canada tar sands processing facility, background, with a tailings pond in the foreground. The Alberta tar sands industry siphons, fee of charge, 370 million cubic meters from the Athabasca River ever year for oil sands processing. Tar sands operations and related water use are expected to double in the next five years, and scientists say that the industry could eventually divert as much as 25 percent of the waters from the Athabasca River at periods of low flow.

Environmental questions about Canada’s massive tar sands development have long centered on greenhouse gas emissions. Now there are mounting concerns about the huge volumes of water used by the oil industry and the impact on the vast Mackenzie River Basin.

Opposition to the mining of Alberta’s tar sands — and the Keystone and Gateway pipelines that would carry their oil to the Gulf of Mexico and Pacific Ocean — has largely been focused on the project’s greenhouse gas emissions and threats to pristine environments along the pipeline rights-of-way.

But another serious issue is coming to the fore — the massive amounts of freshwater being used by the industry. In 2011, companies mining the tar sands siphoned approximately 370 million cubic meters of water from the Athabasca River alone, which was heated or converted into steam to separate the viscous oil, or bitumen, from sand formations. That quantity exceeds the amount of water that the city of Toronto, with a population 2.8 million people, uses annually.

But unlike Torontonians, tar sands companies pay nothing for this water. All they need is a license from the province of Alberta. Nor do they clean it after recycling it and pumping it back into underground aquifers or into tailings ponds, which now cover 170 square kilometers — 66 square miles — of territory in northern Alberta.

A growing number of scientists and economists believe the tar sands industry has already reached a tipping point in its dependence on both surface and groundwater. They contend that the timing and magnitude of these diversions are drying up wetlands, disrupting water flows, and potentially threatening riparian habitats thousands of miles downstream along the Mackenzie River basin, which drains 20 per cent of Canada.

“Nowhere in the world are we seeing this amount of groundwater being used for industrial development,” says William Donahue, a freshwater scientist, lawyer, and special advisor to Water Matters, an Alberta-based think tank. “The scale of these withdrawals is massive and totally unsustainable.”

Henry Vaux, a natural resource economist at the University of California, Riverside, and lead author of a recent report on the Mackenzie River Basin by the Rosenberg International Forum on Water Policy, says it’s time that the tar sands industry’s exploitation of water be addressed.

“It’s an alarming scenario,” says Vaux, whose report links heavy water use by the tar sands to potentially harmful changes in the Mackenzie River Basin, including water pollution, wetlands destruction, and changes in drainage patterns in the Mackenzie headwaters. “Given the rate of expansion in the industry, it’s going to get a lot worse.”

To produce a barrel of oil from the tar sands, the industry says it typically needs between 0.4 and 3.1 barrels of freshwater. In 2008, the tar sands produced 1.31 million barrels of oil per day. That is expected to more than double to three million barrels a day in 2018, further straining water supplies on the Athabasca River and aquifers in northern Alberta. In addition to withdrawing water from other sources, tar sands operations are authorized to divert 652 million cubic meters of water from the Athabasca, double the current volume of withdrawals.

Until several years ago, most tar sands bitumen was obtained through open pit mining, which requires the draining of wetlands, the diversion of streams, the clearcutting of forests, and the removal of soil and overburden. At last count more than 400 square miles of land were being mined in this way. The bitumen-laden sands are then transported to an extraction plant, where hot water is used to separate out the oil.

In recent years, however, in situ mining of tar sands — which involves injecting steam into tar sands deposits too deep to be surface-mined — has escalated. The oil is recovered through an assisted-gravity draining process in which steam and solvents are pumped into the upper portion of the tar sands reservoir. There, the bitumen warms and thins and then drains down into the lower part of the reservoir before being pumped back to the surface.

Open-pit tar sands operations return almost none of the water they use back to the natural cycle because it is toxic and therefore subject to a zero discharge policy. Although a large percentage of the wastewater is recycled, most of it eventually ends up in tailings ponds. Wastewater from in situ processes is routinely re-
injected into the deeper aquifers.

Steve Wallace, head of the province of Alberta’s groundwater management unit, says that the industry’s withdrawal of water from the Athabasca River amounts to about one percent of river flow, although that figure is expected to grow to 2.5 percent as production increases. He acknowledged that this percentage is often much higher in periods of low flow, and a report by the non-profit Pembina Institute said tar sands operations could eventually consume 25 percent of the river’s water during periods of low flow.

Wallace says that major progress has been made in storing and conserving water in the tar sands region since the provincial government enacted new rules in 2006. One of those rules caps the amount of water the industry can use in times of low flow. Last year, Alberta and the Canadian government announced a joint plan to bolster environmental monitoring of water, air, and terrestrial pollution in the tar sands region by 2015.

Industry and government officials have long contended that the contaminants in the tailings ponds are not leaching into the groundwater, as some scientists, conservationists, and aboriginal leaders claim. But the government of Alberta has an inadequate number of groundwater monitoring wells in the tar sands regions. And as a recent Royal Society of Canada expert panel reported, there is also no regional hydrogeological framework in place to assess the cumulative impacts of the oil sands industry on groundwater quality.

But the evidence suggests that surface and groundwater supplies are being tainted. An internal government memo prepared for Canada’s Natural Resources Minister in June 2012 describes how geoscientist Martine Savard and 18 colleagues detected “potentially harmful, mining-related organic acid contaminants in the groundwater outside a long-established... tailings pond.” In the study, Savard and colleagues suggest that acids may be reaching the Athabasca River in small amounts.

Donahue of Water Matters points out that cleaning up contaminated groundwater is sometimes impossible or prohibitively expensive due to the complexity of aquifers and the dynamic nature of underground channels — something that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has learned in attempting to clean up many Superfund sites.

Henry Vaux of the University of California, Riverside suggests that the potential for a collapse, or breach, of one of the tailings ponds dikes is another significant threat.

“One of those dikes is eventually going to let go; there is no such thing as a dike that lasts forever,” he says. “If that happens in the wintertime when the Athabasca River is covered in ice, there is no way of remediating the situation. The polluted water is going to flow a long way.”

In recent weeks, Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. has been unable to stop leaks from an underground oil blowout at an in situ operation. The leak has been contaminating a lake, a forest, and wetlands at its operations at Cold Lake.

In July, Peter Lee of Global Forest Watch Canada and Kevin Timoney of Treeline Ecological Research released a study showing that the province’s records on environmental contamination in the tar sands are incomplete and riddled with errors. Enforcement action, they say, was taken in less than one percent of the more than 4,000 cases where a tar sands facility violated an operating condition.

Water economist David Zetland, who writes the blog Aguanomics, supports the Keystone XL pipeline project because he believes tar sands oil is going to be transported one way or another; the pipeline, he argues, is better than using trucks or trains. But he believes that permitting the tar sands industry to use water for free and allowing companies to reinject polluted water back into the ground or into tailings ponds is a major mistake.

“Those days of abundant [water] supplies are coming to an end, even in Canada,” said Zetland. “The solution is to make people pay for water.”

In an intriguing development earlier this year, a pair of satellites operated by NASA and the German Aerospace Center showed that the tar sands region and a large area downstream of it showed up as a zone of significant water loss. The twin satellites are part of a program known as GRACE, the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, which measures Earth's gravity field in a way that, among other things, allows scientists to better estimate gains and losses in water storage, including groundwater.

James Famiglietti, director of the University of California Center for Hydrologic Modeling and author of a map of the depletion zone, cautioned that more work needs to be done to determine what is causing the depletion. Among possible causes are the over-use of water by the tar sands industry, but also post-glacial rebound, which is active in the region, as well as declines in groundwater reserves because of climate change. But Famiglietti noted, “If the volume of water used in the oil sands production is as large as is the industry says that it is, it is very likely that the GRACE satellites will detect it.”

Even some people associated with the industry are warning of a potential supply shortage as production triples. Clement Bowman is a former vice-president of Esso Petroleum, a former president of the Alberta Research Council, and one-time research manager of tar sands giant Syncrude Canada. He recently co-authored a paper in which he and his colleagues examined water quantity and quality problems in Canada’s tar sands.

“Water issues, such as large-scale water usage and troublesome polluted water disposal concerns connected to Canada’s oil sands industries, must be resolved,” Bowman and his co-authors say. They conclude that charging for water and trading water rights are the best way to ensure water security for the industry, while balancing environmental and social impacts. The status quo, they write, “does not encourage private companies to develop and employ new technologies related to water reduction.”

Vaux is doubtful that the Albert government will be willing to put a price on water. “People in government and industry go silent the moment you raise the subject,” he points out.

What is needed, Vaux says, are performance bonds in which industry sets aside money to clean up future environmental damage . Vaux also contends that given the piecemeal and often self-regulated system that now exists, the federal Canadian government, the Alberta government, the Northwest Territories, and aboriginal communities downstream need to embrace a coordinated, science-based approach to water management in the tar sands region.

“The issue of water in the Mackenzie Basin is one that does not get enough attention,” he says. “It’s a shame because so much territory is affected by the diversions. It’s not just northern Alberta, it’s a river basin system that supports indigenous people and fish and wildlife habitats all the way to the Beaufort Sea.”

Canadian author and photographer Ed Struzik has been writing on the Arctic for three decades. In previous articles for Yale Environment 360, he has written about the potential environmental risks of Canada’s proposed Northern Pipeline and explored what he described as the Canadian government’s assault on environmental regulations.

Read the full report here

This is a modest study on some of the 13 videos nominated by the US Intelligence community and similar documentation. “From the moment when some families of abducted children contacted us to inform us that they recognized the children among those who are presented in the videos as victims of the Chemical Attacks of East Ghouta, we decided to examine the videos thoroughly. …

Our first concern was the fate of the children we see in the footages. Those angels are always alone in the hands of adult males that seem to be elements of armed gangs. The children that trespassed remain without their families and unidentified all the way until they are wrapped in the white shrouds of the burial. Moreover our study highlights without any doubt that their little bodies were manipulated and disposed with theatrical arrangements to figure in the screening.

If the studied footages were edited and published to exhibit pieces of evidence to accuse the Syrian State of perpetrating the chemical attacks on East Ghouta, our discoveries incriminate the editors and actors of forged facts through a lethal manipulation of unidentified children. …

Thus we want to raise awareness toward the humanitarian case of this criminal use of children in the political propaganda of the East Ghouta Chemical Weapons Attack

We present this work to distinguished Spiritual Leaders, Heads of State, Members of Parliament Humanitarian actors and to any person who has heart for truth and justice and seeks to due accountability for evil deeds.“

Mother Agnes Mariam de La Croix,

President, International Support Team for Mussalaha in Syria

Read the full report here

This report is preliminary. The final report with interactive links to the videos and sources is forthcoming.

Recently a group of researchers from Harvard and Oregon State University has published the first global temperature reconstruction for the last 11,000 years – that’s the whole Holocene (Marcott et al. 2013). The results are striking and worthy of further discussion, after the authors have already commented on their results in this blog.

A while ago, I discussed here the new, comprehensive climate reconstruction from the PAGES 2k project for the past 2000 years. But what came before that? Does the long-term cooling trend that ruled most of the last two millennia reach even further back into the past?

Over the last decades, numerous researchers have painstakingly collected, analyzed, dated, and calibrated many data series that allow us to reconstruct climate before the age of direct measurements. Such data come e.g. from sediment drilling in the deep sea, from corals, ice cores and other sources. Shaun Marcott and colleagues for the first time assembled 73 such data sets from around the world into a global temperature reconstruction for the Holocene, published in Science. Or strictly speaking, many such reconstructions: they have tried about twenty different averaging methods and also carried out 1,000 Monte Carlo simulations with random errors added to the dating of the individual data series to demonstrate the robustness of their results.

To show the main result straight away, it looks like this:

Figure 1 Blue curve: Global temperature reconstruction from proxy data of Marcott et al, Science 2013. Shown here is the RegEM version – significant differences between the variants with different averaging methods arise only towards the end, where the number of proxy series decreases. This does not matter since the recent temperature evolution is well known from instrumental measurements, shown in red (global temperature from the instrumental HadCRU data). Graph: Klaus Bitterman.

The climate curve looks like a “hump”. At the beginning of the Holocene – after the end of the last Ice Age – global temperature increased, and subsequently it decreased again by 0.7 ° C over the past 5000 years. The well-known transition from the relatively warm Medieval into the “little ice age” turns out to be part of a much longer-term cooling, which ended abruptly with the rapid warming of the 20th Century. Within a hundred years, the cooling of the previous 5000 years was undone. (One result of this is, for example, that the famous iceman ‘Ötzi’, who disappeared under ice 5000 years ago, reappeared in 1991.)

The shape of the curve is probably not surprising to climate scientists as it fits with the forcing due to orbital cycles. Marcott et al. illustrate the orbital forcing with this graphic:

Figure 2 Changes in incoming solar radiation as a function of latitude in December, January and annual average, due to the astronomical Milankovitch cycles (known as orbital forcing). Source: Marcott et al., 2013.

In the bottom panel we see the sunlight averaged over the year, as it depends on time and latitude. It declined strongly in the mid to high latitudes over the Holocene, but increased slightly in the tropics. In the Marcott reconstruction the global temperature curve is dominated primarily by the large temperature changes in northern latitudes (30-90 °N). For this, the middle panel is particularly relevant: the summer maximum of the incoming radiation. That reduces massively during the Holocene – by more than 30 watts per square meter. (For comparison: the anthropogenic carbon dioxide in the atmosphere produces a radiative forcing of about 2 watts per square meter – albeit globally and throughout the year.) The climate system is particularly sensitive to this summer insolation, because it is amplified by the snow- and ice-albedo feedback. That is why in the Milanković theory summer insolation is the determining factor for the ice age cycles – the strong radiation maximum at the beginning of the Holocene is the reason why the ice masses of the last Ice Age disappeared.

However a puzzle remains: climate models don’t seem to get this cooling trend over the last 5,000 years. Maybe they are underestimating the feedbacks that amplify the northern orbital forcing shown in Fig. 2. Or maybe the proxy data do not properly represent the annual mean temperature but have a summer bias – as Fig. 2 shows, it is in summer that the solar radiation has declined so strongly since the mid-Holocene. As Gavin has just explained very nicely: a model-data mismatch is an opportunity to learn something new, but it takes work to find out what it is.

Comparison with the PAGES 2k reconstruction

The data used by Marcott et al. are different from those of the PAGES 2k project (which used land data only) mainly in that they come to 80% from deep-sea sediments. Sediments reach further back in time (far further than just through the Holocene – but that’s another story). Unlike tree-ring data, which are mainly suitable for the last two thousand years and rarely reach further. However, the sediment data have poorer time resolution and do not extend right up to the present, because the surface of the sediment is disturbed when the sediment core is taken. The methods of temperature reconstruction are very different from those used with the land data. For example, in sediment data the concentration of oxygen isotopes or the ratio of magnesium to calcium in the calcite shells of microscopic plankton are used, both of which show a good correlation with the water temperature. Thus each sediment core can be individually calibrated to obtain a temperature time series for each location.

Overall, the new Marcott reconstruction is largely independent of, and nicely complementary to, the PAGES 2k reconstruction: ocean instead of land, completely different methodology. Therefore, a comparison between the two is interesting:

Figure 3 The last two thousand years from Figure 1, in comparison to the PAGES 2k reconstruction (green), which was recently described here in detail. Graph: Klaus Bitterman.

As we can see, both reconstruction methods give consistent results. That the evolution of the last one thousand years is virtually identical is, by the way, yet another confirmation of the “hockey stick” by Mann et al. 1999, which is practically identical as well (see graph in my PAGES article).

Is the modern warming unique?

Because of the above-mentioned limitations of sediment cores, the new reconstruction does not reach the present but only goes to 1940, and the number of data curves used already strongly declines before that. (Hence we see the uncertainty range getting wider towards the end and the reconstructions with different averaging methods diverge there – we here show the RegEM method because it deals best with the decreasing data coverage. For a detailed analysis see the article by statistician Grant Foster.) The warming of the 20th Century can only be seen partially – but this is not serious, because this warming is very well documented by weather stations anyway. There can be no doubt about the climatic warming during the 20th Century.

There is a degree of flexibility on how the proxy data (blue) should be joined with the thermometer data (red) – here I’ve done this so that for the period 1000 to 1940 AD the average temperature of the Marcott curve and the PAGES 2k reconstruction are equal. I think this is better than the choice of Marcott et al. (whose paper was published before PAGES 2k) – but this is not important. The relative positioning of the curves makes a difference for whether the temperatures are slightly higher at the end than ever before in the Holocene, or only (as Marcott et al write) higher than during 85% of the Holocene. Let us just say they are roughly as high as during the Holocene optimum: maybe slightly cooler, maybe slightly warmer. This is not critical.

The important point is that the rapid rise in the 20th Century is unique throughout the Holocene. Whether this really is true has been intensively discussed in the blogs after the publication of the Marcott paper. Because the proxy data have only a coarse time resolution – would they have shown it if there had been a similarly rapid warming earlier in the Holocene?

I think for three reasons it is extremely likely that there was not such a rapid warming before:

1. There are a number of high-resolution proxy data series over the Holocene, none of which suggest that there was a previous warming spike as strong as in the 20th Century. Had there been such a global warming before, it would very likely have registered clearly in some of these data series, even if it didn’t show up in the averaged Marcott curve.

2. Grant Foster performed the test and hid some “20th C style” heating spikes in earlier parts of the proxy data to see whether they are revealed by the method of Marcott et al – the answer is a resounding yes, they would show up (albeit attenuated) in the averaged curve, see his article if you are interested in the details. [Update 18 Sept: one of our readers has confirmed this conclusion with a different method (Fourier filtering). Thanks!]

3. Such heating must have a physical basis, and it would have to have quickly disappeared again (would it have lasted, it would be even more evident in the proxy data). There is no evidence in the forcing data that such a climate forcing could have suddenly appeared and disappeared, and I cannot imagine what could have been the mechanism. (A CO2-induced warming would persist until the CO2 concentration decays again over thousands of years – and of course we have good data on the concentration of CO2 and other greenhouse gases for the whole Holocene.)

Conclusion

The curve (or better curves) of Marcott et al. will not be the last word on the global temperature history during the Holocene; like Mann et al. in 1998 it is the opening of the scientific discussion. There will certainly be alternative proposals, and here and there some corrections and improvements. However, I believe that (as was the case with Mann et al. for the last millennium) the basic shape will turn out to be robust: a relatively smooth curve with slow cooling trend lasting millennia from the Holocene optimum to the “little ice age”, mainly driven by the orbital cycles. At the end this cooling trend is abruptly reversed by the modern anthropogenic warming.

The following graph shows the Marcott reconstruction complemented by some context: the warming at the end of the last Ice Age (which 20,000 years ago reached its peak) and a medium projection for the expected warming in the 21st Century if humanity does not quickly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Figure 4 Global temperature variation since the last ice age 20,000 years ago, extended until 2100 for a medium emissions scenario with about 3 degrees of global warming. Graph: Jos Hagelaars.

Marcott et al. dryly state about this future prospect:

By 2100, global average temperatures will probably be 5 to 12 standard deviations above the Holocene temperature mean. In other words: We are catapulting ourselves way out of the Holocene.

Just looking at the known drivers (climate forcings) and the actual temperature history shows it directly, without need for a climate model: without the increase in greenhouse gases caused by humans, the slow cooling trend would have continued. Thus virtually the entire warming of the 20th Century is due to man. This May, for the first time in at least a million years, the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere has exceeded the threshold of 400 ppm. If we do not stop this trend very soon, we will not recognize our Earth by the end of this century.

A physicist and oceanographer by training, Stefan Rahmstorf has moved from early work in general relativity theory to working on climate issues. He has done research at the New Zealand Oceanographic Institute, at the Institute of Marine Science in Kiel and since 1996 at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany (in Potsdam near Berlin). His work focuses on the role of ocean currents in climate change, past and present. In 1999 Rahmstorf was awarded the $ 1 million Centennial Fellowship Award of the US-based James S. McDonnell foundation. Since 2000 he teaches physics of the oceans as a professor at Potsdam University. Rahmstorf is a member of the Advisory Council on Global Change of the German government and of the Academia Europaea. He is a lead author of the paleoclimate chapter of the 4th assessment report of the IPCC. More information about his research and publication record can be found here.
Here’s a portrait in Vanity Fair.

Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, speaks to RTCC about climate justice, the UN, and why climate skeptics make her angry

Pic: Flickr / Open Government Partnership

Climate justice is a phrase which eludes a neat definition. 

Morally laden and politically controversial, it is used interchangeably to discuss the law, politics and ethics of climate change. Even the most seasoned negotiators may find themselves promoting one of its many meanings over another.

For Mary Robinson, these various meanings are not disconnected concepts, but a jigsaw of related ideas that together create a comprehensive picture of how best to tackle one of the world's greatest problems: ?When we're talking about climate change, the issue of justice starts with injustice,? she says.

A barrister, a politician, and a top official in the UN, Robinson, now 69, remains best known as the first female president of Ireland ? a largely ceremonial role she occupied between 1990 and 1997 through which she strove to influence through the ?moral authority? it bestowed on her.

She admits that moral leadership continues to fascinate her, and is something she continues to exercise since became a member of the Elders in 2007, a group of global leaders, brought together by Nelson Mandela, who work together to provide guidance on peace making and human rights.

She was led to the climate debate, she says, not as a scientist or even as an environmentalist, but through her campaign work on human rights.

?I was very struck by the fact that the impacts of climate change are undermining a whole range of human rights: rights to food, safe water and health and education,? she says.

?But it is also displacing people, which is very likely to cause not just human distress but potentially conflict. So for me it's a very, very serious issue of human rights.?

Throughout her career, Robinson has taken many approaches to the fight against injustice. Not satisfied to rely on the influence she wields through the UN, she has also sought to encourage leadership at a grassroots level, and established the Mary Robinson Foundation ? Climate Justice, through which she promotes action on a more direct scale than is possible through her other roles.

?There's good grassroots leadership if only we'd listen to it,? she says. ?They are the resilient experts on how to cope with the increasing negative impacts of climate change.

?I'm very struck by the resilience of local communities and the local knowledge that is used, but they don't have insurance, and the unpredictability is really hurting.?

As a lawyer, trained in her teens and early twenties at Trinity College Dublin and Harvard Law School , she is now advocating for a strong legal framework through which climate policy can be enforced.

The Mary Robinson Foundation has joined forces with the World Resources Institute to put together a declaration on climate change to be published during the week of the United National General Assembly, highlighting issues that need to be addressed to bring about climate justice.

One aspect of the declaration that she says she is particularly pleased about is that it highlights the importance of rule of law.

?There is a need for a strong legal framework to ensure transparency, credibility and effective enforcement of climate and related policy. We firmly believe that legal systems need to protect the most vulnerable,? she says.

As former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Robinson has learnt from experience how to work the system at an international level, and is hopeful that this declaration, put together by former heads of state, climate experts and also representatives of social communities and academia, will prevent the issue of climate justice being drowned out by other concerns.

Equity 

She is passionate about the overtly political issue of equity, which is becoming ever more prominent at high level negotiations.

Discussions of equity, or the issue of who should foot the bill for climate change, are particularly prone to slipping into emotive debate, with the wrangling over how the developed countries can best make amends for their historical responsibility for climate change having held up concrete action for years.

But enshrining principles of justice into mutually satisfying financial arrangements is always going to be a troublesome task, and it doesn't help that the dryly worded UNFCCC definition ? ?common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities? ? is frustratingly vague, leaving open for interpretation some of the most controversial decisions about what ?justice' actually means.

The difficulties embedded in this definition makes talking about the equity issue problematic, says Robinson.

Developed countries, for instance, who are looking to avoid donating vast sums to other countries, can promote the ?capability' aspect of equity over their own ?responsibility', suggesting that any country with the ability to do so should take the flak for reducing their own emissions regardless of their historical responsibility for the problem.

Developing economies such as China , on the other hand, will focus on their right to use fossil fuels to develop in the present as the UK and the US have done in the past, and that it is therefore up to these countries to enable them to do so.

Meanwhile, in places such as Gambia , where emissions remain low but climate impacts are already severe, the endless quarrelling over equity can seem little more than a frustrating failure to act.

A practical approach

Despite her concern for the damage already being done to the most vulnerable countries, Robinson is unwilling to let the emotional nature of the problem interfere with her pursuit of the most effective solution. Indeed, she says that her response to climate change in general stems more from ?emotional intelligence? than emotion itself.

In the clipped tones of a veteran politician, she says: ?Now the emerging countries are responsible for a greater part of the emissions, and developing countries generally emit more than the developed world, so we've got a new kind of responsibility, and that's why I think you can get locked in to the historic responsibility in an unrealistic way.?

But, she adds: ?There has to be an acknowledgement of the historic responsibility before people fully appreciate it.?

?It has to be acknowledged, and it has to be addressed in particular by greater commitments by those countries that benefited in their economic development from fossil fuels ? that's the reality.

?Therefore they have to commit to more serious reductions of emissions because they're in a position to move more rapidly towards renewable energy.?

The only time when her pragmatic breed of stoicism slips is when the subject of climate deniers arises. It is ?hard to be patient? with skeptics, she says, because of the corrupt way in which much of it is funded by fossil fuel lobbies.

?That makes me angry because they're playing with the future of people in the world, and it's an injustice that it's hurting the poorest already and will hurt them most,? she says.

?So I do feel quite angry ? not just frustrated, quite angry ? at lobbying against the reality. Climate justice keeps faith with science and is based on acknowledging the importance of the true science on this.?

Human rights

She left the UN as High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2002, but has since taken up the role of Special Envoy to the Great Lakes region of Africa, which encompasses the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda ? countries where conflict and climate stresses are putting human rights on the top of the agenda ? on the particular request of Ban Ki-moon.

In every country in the Great Lakes , she says, climate shocks are undermining food security, while the population just keeps on rising. But, she adds, the thought processes surrounding the two issues are still not as connected as they could be.

?Governments have agreed in the context of the Human Rights Council that climate change is eroding and undermining the protection of human rights, but this has not been joined up to thinking in the context of the environmental and energy ministers who go to the climate conference,? she says.

?I believe we have to join that up more. That's where climate justice is helpful, because it's a link between climate change, development and human rights. We will be working strongly with the Human Rights Council over the coming year to make sure that voice is heard and that we have joined up thinking at government level.?

United Nations

Is it possible to spend so many years in the UN and not be disillusioned by the system, which has so far failed to put a satisfying proposal on the table on how to cut global carbon emissions?

?It's always frustrating,? she says, ?and yet the UN has the value that all countries are involved in it, so I have to be patient with a very bureaucratic and sometimes unwieldy system and try to get results.?

Plus, she adds, despite her emphasis on the virtues of grassroots leadership, she still firmly believes that the UN is key to getting the world back on track.

?We can come together under the UN system if we are intelligent about what we want to do, that we want a fair robust climate agreement,? she says, ?because we must have an agreement which commits countries to bring us below the 2C warming, which will mean a safe world for generations to come.

?That's a huge responsibility and we cannot avoid it. We do need the climate agreement to reach that.?

And the 21st Conference of Parties in Paris in 2015 ? an event which many look towards as the final deadline for putting a framework in place to reduce global carbon emissions ? is an unparalleled opportunity to should this responsibility, she says.

?It's very rare to have a year like 2015, where the world faces two huge complementary agendas,? she says, referring to the paradigm-shifting replacement of the Millennium Development Goals with a set of Sustainable Development Goals, along with the global commitment to come up with a legally binding agreement that will keep the world below 2C of warming, the temperature considered ?safe' by scientists.

?I borrow the words of Desmond Tutu: I'm not an optimist, I'm a prisoner of hope,? she says.

?I'm a grandmother. I think a lot about my four grandchildren. They'll be in their forties by 2050 and they'll share the world with nine billion others. I want it to be a safer world than we're predicting at the moment. I want it to be a world where they can say at least when they got round to it in 2015 they took their responsibilities.

?I don't want them to say how could they have been so selfish and so stupid that they didn't see the impacts on us and our children and grandchildren in the future? That's a preoccupation of mine.

?If by the end of 2015 we have really accepted and understood our responsibilities then I think our grandchildren and their grandchildren will acknowledge that we helped them.?

In the long run, because of the enormously destructive weapons, which have been produced through the misuse of science, the survival of civilization can only be ensured if we are able to abolish the institution of war. We must also stop destroying our planet through unlimited growth of industry and population.

Science and technology have shown themselves to be double-edged, capable of doing great good or of producing great harm, depending on the way in which we use the enormous power over nature, which science has given to us. For this reason, ethical thought is needed now more than ever before. The wisdom of the world's religions, the traditional wisdom of humankind, can help us as we try to ensure that our overwhelming material progress will be beneficial rather than disastrous.

The crisis of civilization, which we face today, has been produced by the rapidity with which science and technology have developed. Our institutions and ideas adjust too slowly to the change. The great challenge which history has given to our generation is the task of building new international political structures, which will be in harmony with modern technology. We must abolish war and stabilize the global population. At the same time, we must develop a new global ethic, which will replace our narrow loyalties by loyalty to humanity as a whole.

Abolition of the institution of war will require the construction of structures of international government and law to replace our present anarchy at the global level. Today's technology has shrunken the distances, which once separated nations; and our present system of absolutely sovereign nation-states has become both obsolete and dangerous.

Besides a humane, democratic and just framework of international law and governance, we urgently need a new global ethic, an ethic where loyalty to family, community and nation will be supplemented by a strong sense of the brotherhood of all humans, regardless of race, religion or nationality. Schiller expressed this feeling in his “Ode to Joy”, the text of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Hearing Beethoven's music and Schiller's words, most of us experience an emotion of resonance and unity with its message: All humans are brothers and sisters - not just some - all! It is almost a national anthem of humanity. The feelings which the music and words provoke are similar to patriotism, but broader. It is this sense of a universal human family, which we need to cultivate in education, in the mass media, and in religion.

Educational reforms are urgently needed, particularly in the teaching of history. As it is taught today, history is a chronicle of power struggles and war, told from a biased national standpoint. Our own race or religion is superior; our own country is always heroic and in the right.

We urgently need to replace this indoctrination in chauvinism by a reformed view of history, where the slow development of human culture is described, giving adequate credit to all those who have contributed. Our modern civilization is built on the achievements of ancient cultures. China, India, Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, Greece, the Islamic world, Christian Europe, and Jewish intellectual traditions all have contributed. Potatoes, corn and squash are gifts from the American Indians. Human culture, gradually built up over thousands of years by the patient work of millions of hands and minds, should be presented to students of history as a precious heritage: far too precious to be risked in a thermonuclear war.

Tribalism, cultural evolution and ethics

Our remote ancestors, 100,000 years ago, lived in small, genetically homogeneous tribes, competing for territory on the grasslands of Africa. It was during this period that human emotions were formed. Since marriage was far more common within a tribe than outside it, the members of a tribe shared a common gene pool, and the tribe as a whole was the unit upon which the forces of natural selection acted. The tribe as a whole either survived or perished. This fact can explain the pattern of altruism and aggression that we observe in human emotional behavior. Humans show great altruism and loyalty to members of their own group, but they can show terrible aggression to outsiders if they believe that their own group is threatened by them.

The rapid and constantly accelerating speed of cultural evolution of humans has changed the way of life of our hunter-gatherer ancestors beyond recognition. As the pace of cultural information accumulation quickened, genetic change could no longer keep up. Genetically we are almost identical with our Neolithic ancestors; but their world has been replaced by a world of quantum theory, relativity, supercomputers, antibiotics, genetic engineering and space telescopes; unfortunately also a world of nuclear weapons and nerve-gas. Because of the slowness of genetic evolution in comparison to the rapid and constantly-accelerating rate of cultural change, our bodies and emotions are not adapted to our new way of life. They still reflect the way of life of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

Fortunately humans show a great capacity for overwriting primitive emotions with learned ethical behavior. Many of the great ethical teachers of history lived at a time when cultural evolution was changing humans from hunter-gatherers and pastoral peoples to farmers and city dwellers. To live and cooperate in larger groups, humans needed to overwrite their instinctive behavior patterns with culturally-determined behavior involving a wider range of cooperation than previously. This period of change is marked by the lives and ideas of a number of great ethical teachers: Moses, Buddha, Lao Tse, Confucius, Socrates, Aristotle, Jesus, and Saint Paul. Muhammad lived at a slightly later period, but it was still a period of transition for the Arab peoples, a period during which their range cooperation needed to be enlarged.

Today, the world is divided into sovereign nation-states, whose leaders appeal to our primitive tribal emotions to create quasi-religious cults of nationalism. However, because of the terrible destructive power of modern weapons, which are capable of destroying human civilization and much of the biosphere, nationalism has today become a dangerous anachronism. We urgently need a higher ethic, an ethic for the future, where nationalism is replaced by loyalty to humanity as a whole. It must also be an ethic where we strongly feel a duty to protect all living creatures and the earth's environment.

The world's religions

There is a remarkable agreement on ethical principles between the major religions of the world. The central ethical principles of Christianity can be found in the Sermon on the Mount and in the Parable of the Good Samaritan. In the Sermon on the Mount, we are told that we must not only love our neighbors as much as we love ourselves; we must also love and forgive our enemies. This seemingly impractical advice is in fact of great practicality, since escalatory cycles of revenge and counter-revenge can only be ended by unilateral acts of kindness.

In the Parable of the Good Samaritan, we are told that our neighbor, whom we must love, is not necessarily a member of our own ethnic group. Our neighbor may live on the other side of the world and belong to an entirely different race or culture; but he or she still deserves our love and care.

It is an interesting fact that the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, appears in various forms in all of the world's major religions. The Wikipedia article on the Golden Rule gives an impressive and fascinating list of the forms in which the rule appears in many cultures and religions. For example, in ancient China, both Confucius and Laozi express the Golden Rule, but they do it slightly differently: Zi Gong asked, saying, ”Is there one word that may serve as a rule of practice for all one's life?” The Master said, “Is not reciprocity such a word?” (Confucius) and “The sage has no interest of his own, but takes the interests of the people as his own. He is kind to the kind; he is also kind to the unkind: for Virtue is kind. He is faithful to the faithful; he is also faithful to the unfaithful: for Virtue is faithful.” (Laozi)

In the Jewish tradition, we have “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus)

In Islam: A Bedouin came to the prophet, grabbed the stirrup of his camel and said: O the messenger of God! Teach me something to go to heaven with. The Prophet said: “As you would have people do to you, do to them; and what you dislike to be done to you, don't do to them. This maxim is enough for you; go and act in accordance with it!” (Kitab al-Kafi, vol. 2, p. 146)

These fundamental ethical principles, shared by all of the world's major religions, would be enough to make war impossible if they were only followed. But too often, religion has emphasized the differences between ethnic groups rather than appealing for comprehensive human solidarity. Too often, religion has been a source of conflict and war, rather than a force which would make war impossible. Too often, religion has been part of the problem, rather than the solution, but it could potentially be the solution. Every week, in churches, mosques, temples and synagogues, congregations listen to sermons which could potentially carry the message of peace, abolition of war, abolition of nuclear weapons and also the message of universal human brotherhood. If our religious leaders do not use this opportunity, they will be failing humanity at a time of mortal danger.

Can ethical principles be derived from science?

It is often said that ethical principles cannot be derived from science, that they must come from somewhere else. Nevertheless, when nature is viewed through the eyes of modern science, we obtain some insights which seem almost ethical in character. Biology at the molecular level has shown us the complexity and beauty of even the most humble living organisms, and the interrelatedness of all life on earth. Looking through the eyes of contemporary biochemistry, we can see that even the single cell of an amoeba is a structure of miraculous complexity and precision, worthy of our respect and wonder.

Knowledge of the second law of thermodynamics , the statistical law favoring disorder over order, reminds us that life is always balanced like a tight-rope walker over an abyss of chaos and destruction. Living organisms distill their order and complexity from the flood of thermodynamic information which reaches the earth from the sun. In this way, they create local order; but life remains a fugitive from the second law of thermodynamics. Disorder, chaos, and destruction remain statistically favored over order, construction, and complexity.

It is easier to burn down a house than to build one, easier to kill a human than to raise and educate one, easier to force a species into extinction than to replace it once it is gone, easier to burn the Great Library of Alexandria than to accumulate the knowledge that once filled it, and easier to destroy a civilization in a thermonuclear war than to rebuild it from the radioactive ashes. Knowing this, we can form an almost ethical insight: To be on the side of order, construction, and complexity, is to be on the side of life. To be on the side of destruction, disorder, chaos and war is to be against life, a traitor to life, an ally of death. Knowing the precariousness of life, knowing the statistical laws that favor disorder and chaos, we should resolve to be loyal to the principle of long continued construction upon which life depends.

War is based on destruction, destruction of living persons, destruction of homes, destruction of infrastructure, and destruction of the biosphere. If we are on the side of life, if we are not traitors to life and allies of death, we must oppose the institution of war. We must oppose the military-industrial complex. We must oppose the mass media when they whip up war-fever. We must oppose politicians who vote for obscenely enormous military budgets at a time of financial crisis. We must oppose these things by working with dedication, as though our lives depended on it. In fact, they do.

The need for a new system of economics

Our present economic system is one of the main causes of war, and one of the main reasons why we are destroying the earth's environment. We need a new economic system, which will have both a social conscience and an environmental conscience.

According to the great classical economist Adam Smith (1723-1790), self-interest (even greed) is a sufficient guide to human economic actions. The passage of time has shown that Smith was right in many respects. The free market, which he advocated, has turned out to be the optimum prescription for economic growth. However, history has also shown that there is something horribly wrong or incomplete about the idea that individual self-interest alone, uninfluenced by ethical and ecological considerations, and totally free from governmental intervention, can be the main motivating force of a happy and just society. There has also proved to be something terribly wrong with the concept of unlimited economic growth.

During the early phases of the Industrial Revolution, the landowners of Scotland were unquestionably following self-interest as they burned the cottages of their crofters because it was more profitable to have sheep on the land; and self-interest motivated overseers as they whipped half-starved child workers in England's mills. Adam Smith's “invisible hand” no doubt guided their actions in such a way as to maximize production. But the result was a society with enormous contrasts between rich and poor, a society in which a large fraction of the population lived in conditions of gross injustice and terrible suffering. Self-interest alone was not enough.

A society following purely economic laws, a society where selfishness is exalted as the mainspring for action, lacks both the ethical and ecological dimensions that are needed for social justice, widespread happiness, and sustainability. That is true today, just as it was during the early phases of the Industrial Revolution. In fact, Adam Smith himself would have accepted this criticism of his enthronement of self-interest as the central principle of society. He believed that his “invisible hand” would not work for the betterment of society except within the context of governmental regulation. His modern Neoliberal admirers, however, forget this aspect of Smith's philosophy, and maintain that market forces alone can achieve a desirable result.

Today, in many countries, gigantic corporations control governments, and they act not only to promote “resource wars”, but also to promote the unlimited economic growth that is destroying the global environment. The idea that growth can continue forever on a finite planet is an absurdity. Therefore we urgently need a new form of economics: Ecological Economics or Steady-State Economics.

When possessions are used for the purpose of social competition, demand has no natural upper limit; it is then limited only by the size of the human ego, which, as we know, is boundless. This would be all to the good if unlimited industrial growth were desirable; but today, when further industrial growth implies future collapse, western society urgently needs to find new values to replace our worship of power, our restless chase after excitement, and our admiration of excessive consumption. We must stop using material goods for the purpose of social competition.

In the world of the future, a future of changed values, women with take their places beside men in positions of responsibility, children will be educated rather than exploited, non-material human qualities, such as kindness, politeness, knowledge and musical and artistic ability will be valued more highly, and people will derive a larger part of their pleasure from conversation and from the appreciation of unspoiled nature. These are the values that we need for the future, a future that belongs not only to ourselves, but to our children and grandchildren.

In the world as it is today, 1.7 trillion dollars are wasted on armaments each year; and while this is going on, children in the developing countries sift through garbage dumps searching for scraps of food. In today's world, the competition for jobs and for material possessions makes part of the population of the industrial countries work so hard that they damage their health and neglect their families; and while this is going on, another part of the population suffers from unemployment, becoming vulnerable to depression, mental illness, alcoholism, drug abuse and crime.

In the world of the future, which we now must build, the institution of war will be abolished, and the enormous resources now wasted on war will be used constructively. In the future world as it can be if we work to make it so, a stable population of moderate size will live without waste or luxury, but in comfort and security, free from the fear of hunger or unemployment. The world which we want will be a world of changed values, where human qualities will be valued more than material possessions. Let us try to combine wisdom and religious ethics from humanity's past with today's technology to build a sustainable, livable and equitable future world.

This essay is excerpted from Jeffrey St. Clair’s book Grand Theft Pentagon. As Washington deliberates about a 'principled' response to an alleged use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government, the history of the US's own use of chemical and biological weapons should be read widely. 

The United States, which has deployed its CBW arsenal against the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Cuba, Haitian boat people and Canada, plus exposure of hundreds of thousands of unwitting US citizens to an astonishing array of germ agents and toxic chemicals, killing dozens of people.

The US experimentation with bio-weapons goes back to the distribution of cholera-infect blankets to American Indian tribes in the 1860s. In 1900, US Army doctors in the Philippines infected five prisoners with a variety of plague and 29 prisoners with Beriberi. At least four of the subjects died. In 1915, a doctor working with government grants exposed 12 prisoners in Mississippi to pellagra, an incapacitating disease that attacks the central nervous system.

After World War I, the United States went on a chemical weapons binge, producing millions of barrels of mustard gas and Lewisite. Thousands of US troops were exposed to these chemical agents in order to “test the efficacy of gas masks and protective clothing”. The Veterans Administration refused to honor disability claims from victims of such experiments. The Army also deployed mustard gas against anti-US protesters in Puerto Rico and the Philippines in the 1920s and 1930s.

In 1931, Dr. Cornelius Rhoads, then under contract with the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Investigations, initiated his horrific Puerto Rico Cancer Experiments, infecting dozens of unwitting subjects with cancer cells.At least thirteen of his victims died as a result. Rhoads went on to headof the US Army Biological Weapons division and to serve on the Atomic Energy Commission, where he oversaw radiation experiments on thousands of US citizens. In memos to the Department of Defense, Rhoads expressed his opinion that Puerto Rican dissidents could be “eradicated” with the judicious use of germ bombs.

In 1942, US Army and Navy doctors infected 400 prisoners in Chicago withmalaria in experiments designed to get “a profile of the disease and develop a treatment for it.” Most of the inmates were black and none was informed of the risks of the experiment. Nazi doctors on trial at Nuremberg cited the Chicago malaria experiments as part of their defense.

At the close of World War II, the US Army put on its payroll, Dr. Shiro Ishii, the head of the Imperial Army of Japan’s bio-warfare unit. Dr. Ishii had deployed a wide range of biological and chemical agents against Chinese and Allied troops. He also operated a large research center in Manchuria,where he conducted bio-weapons experiments on Chinese, Russian and American prisoners of war. Ishii infected prisoners with tetanus; gave them typhoid-laced tomatoes; developed plague-infected fleas; infected women with syphilis; performed dissections on live prisoners; and exploded germ bombs over dozens of men tied to stakes. In a deal hatched by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Ishii turned over more than 10,000 pages of his “research findings”to the US Army, avoided prosecution for war crimes and was invited to lecture at Ft. Detrick, the US Army bio-weapons center in Frederick, Maryland.

In 1950 the US Navy sprayed large quantities of serratia marcescens, a bacteriological agent, over San Francisco, promoting an outbreak of pneumonia-like illnesses and causing the death of at least one man, Ed Nevins.

A year later, Chinese Premier Chou En-lai charged that the US military and the CIA had used bio-agents against North Korea and China. Chou produced statements from 25 US prisoners of war backing him his claims that the US had dropped anthrax contaminated feathers, mosquitoes and fleas carrying Yellow Fever and propaganda leaflets spiked with cholera over Manchuria and North Korea.

From 1950 through 1953, the US Army released chemical clouds over six US and Canadian cities. The tests were designed to test dispersal patterns of chemical weapons. Army records noted that the compounds used over Winnipeg, Canada, where there were numerous reports of respiratory illnesses, involved cadmium, a highly toxic chemical.

In 1951 the US Army secretly contaminated the Norfolk Naval Supply Centerin Virginia with infectious bacteria. One type was chosen because blackswere believed to be more susceptible than whites. A similar experiment was undertaken later that year at Washington, DC’s National Airport. The bacteria was later linked to food and blood poisoning and respiratory problems.

Savannah, Georgia and Avon Park, Florida were the targets of repeatedArmy bio-weapons experiments in 1956 and 1957. Army CBW researchers released millions of mosquitoes on the two towns in order to test the ability of insects to carry and deliver yellow fever and dengue fever. Hundreds of residents fell ill, suffering from fevers, respiratory distress, stillbirths, encephalitis and typhoid. Army researchers disguised themselves as public health workers in order photograph and test the victims. Several deaths were reported.

In 1965 the US Army and the Dow Chemical Company injected dioxin into 70 prisoners (most of them black) at the Holmesburg State Prison in Pennsylvania. The prisoners developed severe lesions which went untreated for seven months. A year later, the US Army set about the most ambitious chemical warfare operation in history.

From 1966 to 1972, the United States dumped more than 12 million gallonsof Agent Orange (a dioxin-powered herbicide) over about 4.5 million acresof South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The government of Vietnam estimate the civilian casualties from Agent Orange at more than 500,000. The legacy continues with high levels of birth defects in areas that were saturated with the chemical. Tens of thousands of US soldiers were also the victims of Agent Orange.

In a still classified experiment, the US Army sprayed an unknown bacterial agent in the New York Subway system in 1966. It is not known if the test caused any illnesses.

A year later, the CIA placed a chemical substance in the drinking water supply of the Food and Drug Administration headquarters in Washington, DC. The test was designed to see if it was possible to poison drinking water with LSD or other incapacitating agents.

In 1969, Dr. D.M. McArtor, the deputy director for Research and Technologyfor the Department of Defense, asked Congress to appropriate $10 millionfor the development of a synthetic biological agent that would be resistant” to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease”.

In 1971 the first documented cases of swine fever in the western hemisphere showed up in Cuba. A CIA agent later admitted that he had been instructed to deliver the virus to Cuban exiles in Panama, who carried the virus into Cuba in March of 1991. This astounding admission received scant attention in the US press.

In 1980, hundreds of Haitian men, who had been locked up in detention camps in Miami and Puerto Rico, developed gynecomasia after receiving “hormone” shots from US doctors. Gynecomasia is a condition causing males to developfull-sized female breasts.

In 1981, Fidel Castro blamed an outbreak of dengue fever in Cuba on the CIA. The fever killed 188 people, including 88 children. In 1988, a Cuban exile leader named Eduardo Arocena admitted “bringing some germs” into Cuba in 1980.

Four years later an epidemic of dengue fever struck Managua, Nicaragua.Nearly 50,000 people came down with the fever and dozens died. This was the first outbreak of the disease in Nicaragua. It occurred at the height of the CIA’s war against the Sandinista government and followed a series of low-level “reconnaissance” flights over the capital city.

In 1996, the Cuba government again accused the US of engaging in “biological aggression”. This time it involved an outbreak of thrips palmi, an insect that kills potato crops, palm trees and other vegetation. Thrips first showed up in Cuba on December 12, 1996, following low-level flights over the island by US government spray planes. The US was able to quash a United Nations investigation of the incident.

At the close of the Gulf War, the US Army exploded an Iraqi chemical weapons depot at Kamashiya. In 1996, the Department of Defense finally admitted that more than 20,000 US troops were exposed to VX and sarin nerve agentsas a result of the US operation at Kamashiya. This may be one cause of Gulf War Illness, another cause is certainly the experimental vaccines unwittingly given to more than 100,000 US troops.

If Syria eventually agrees to relinquish its stockpile of chemical arms under the 1993 international Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), what of the six other countries that have either shown reluctance or refused to join the treaty?

Currently, there are 189 states that have signed and ratified the treaty prohibiting the manufacture, use and transfer of the deadly weapons. But seven member states have been holdouts: Burma and Israel have signed but not ratified, while Angola, North Korea, Egypt, South Sudan and Syria have neither signed nor ratified.

If Syria agrees to accept the U.S.-Russia proposal to abandon its weapons under the CWC, it still leaves six others outside the treaty.

A meeting of the Security Council to discuss Syria, scheduled to take place Tuesday, was cancelled without explanation.

If a resolution, inspired by Western nations, is adopted by the Council later in the week, Syria is expected to agree to hand over all of its chemical weapons for storage and destruction by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) based in The Hague, Netherlands.

Asked what progress the Security Council has made on the proposal, the president of the Council, Ambassador Gary Francis Quilan of Australia, told reporters it was premature to speculate.

“It’s a step by step process,” he said.

Stephen Zunes, professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco, who has written extensively on weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), singled out two other Middle Eastern nations, Egypt and Israel, as either having developed or used chemical weapons.

He pointed out that Israel is widely believed to have produced and stockpiled an extensive range of chemical weapons and is engaged in ongoing research and development of additional chemical weaponry.

“The insistence that Syria must unilaterally give up its chemical weapons and missiles while allowing a powerful and hostile neighbour to maintain and expand its sizeable arsenal of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons is simply unreasonable,” Zunes told IPS.

No country, whether autocratic or democratic, could be expected to accept such conditions, he added.

Egypt was the first country in the region to obtain and use chemical weapons, using phosgene and mustard gas in the mid-1960s during its intervention in Yemen’s civil war.

“There is no indication Egypt has ever destroyed any of its chemical agents or weapons,” said Zunes.

The U.S.-backed regime of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak continued its chemical weapons research and development programme until its ouster in a popular uprising two and a half years ago, and the programme is believed to have continued subsequently, he noted.

Asked whether the United Nations has the capacity to handle the weapons, U.N. associate spokesperson Farhan Haq told IPS, “The secretary-general has consistently called for Syria to accede to the Chemical Weapons Convention and to fully abide by its responsibility to maintain the physical security of any chemical weapon stockpiles in its possession.”

The OPCW, which oversees the CWC, has considerable experience storing and destroying chemical weapons.

In a statement released Tuesday, Amnesty International USA said it welcomes steps that would lead to the removal or destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons, given that they are internationally banned and their use is a war crime.

“Taking this initiative to the U.N. Security Council offers an opportunity for the international community to take other concrete action to stop the flow of conventional weapons that have caused the vast majority of civilian deaths, refer the situation for criminal investigation, and demand unfettered access for the U.N.-mandated Commission of Inquiry,” said Amnesty’s Deputy Executive Director Frank Jannuzi.

Asked about the proposal to transfer Syria’s chemical stocks to international control, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told reporters Monday, “I think that would be proper [thing] for Syria to do, to agree to these proposals.

“Then I am sure that the international community will [take] very swift action to make sure that these chemical weapons stocks will be stored safely and will be destroyed. I do not have any doubt and worry about that. First and foremost, Syria must agree positively to this,” he added.

Harking back in history, Zunes told IPS Syria’s chemical weapons programme was established in response to Israel’s development of a chemical and nuclear arsenal.

The Syrian government has long expressed its willingness to give up its chemical weapons as part of a regional disarmament agreement as called for in U.N. Security Council resolution 687, which stated that Iraqi disarmament was the first step in establishing a regional disarmament regime.

When it had a non-permanent seat on the Security Council in December 2002, Syria introduced a draft resolution to this effect, but it was not tabled due to a threatened U.S. veto, he added.

Zunes said for more than 45 years, the Syrians have witnessed successive U.S. administrations provide massive amounts of armaments to a neighbouring country with a vastly superior military capability which has invaded, occupied, and colonised Syria’s Golan province in the southwest.

In 2007, the United States successfully pressured Israel to reject peace overtures from the Syrian government in which the Syrians offered to recognise Israel and agree to strict security guarantees in return for a complete Israeli withdrawal from occupied Syrian territory, he noted.

The Syrian uprising’s first stirrings in 2011 marked the Arab Spring’s arrival to a country ruled by a regime intent on holding onto power forever. But two and a half years after protests first broke out, the uprising has turned into a catastrophic civil war fueled by outside powers jockeying for their own interests.

Inspired by the fall of dictators in Egypt and Tunisia, Syrian children in the border town of Deraa drew anti-government graffiti on a school in February 2011. The arrests and brutal torture of the 15 young boys sparked protests that spread across the country. The Assad regime unleashed immense firepower on Syrian demonstrators calling for democracy and an end to the Assad family’s 43-year reign. The opposition then took up arms, eventually forming what came to be known as the Free Syrian Army (FSA), a ragtag group of fighters loosely organized to try to bring down Assad’s regime. While the FSA has taken over some territory, the Assad regime still exercises power in the country.

Meanwhile, the ongoing fighting has attracted thousands of foreign fighters, some of them radical Islamists, to take on Assad, who is viewed unfavorably by them because of his Alawite religious sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

Outside powers also got involved quickly. So what started out as a civil uprising against years of repression, poverty and government corruption turned into a regional proxy war that is now engulfing the entire Middle East, with the nonviolent section of the opposition withering under the weight of civil war. Refugees have poured into Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Jordan, and Lebanon has itself seen fighting linked to the Syrian crisis.

Now, the United States’ threats to rain cruise missiles down on Damascus threatens to ignite more turmoil in the region. Here’s a guide to the external players playing a role in and fueling the Syrian crisis, which has claimed the lives of over 100,000 people and displaced a third of the population.

1. United States

The looming military strikes on Syria by the U.S. would be the most forceful intervention yet from the world’s superpower. But even without the strikes, the U.S. has long played an outside role during the Syrian civil war.

President Barack Obama first showed his hand in 2011, when he said, “the time has come for President Assad to step aside.” By the next year, the CIA was training Syrian rebels in Jordan, a longstanding ally of the U.S. now playing an important role as a base for the rebels and a haven for millions of refugees. CIA agents have trained a small group of FSA fighters with anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons in the hopes of helping American-vetted rebels gain an upper hand in the civil war. And in March 2013, the New York Times reportedthat “with help from the C.I.A., Arab governments and Turkey have sharply increased their military aid to Syria’s opposition fighters.”

The training of rebels represented a direct break from past U.S. dealings with the Assad regime. Before the uprising emerged, the U.S. had a complicated relationship with Syria which included cooperation on anti-terrorism, sanctioning the regime and meeting with the Assads to encourage U.S.-backed reform measures.

But the U.S. training of the rebels made only a small impact. Perhaps the most effective fighting force within Syria has been the Jabhat al-Nusra front, an Al-Qaeda linked group. Trepidation about U.S. arms falling into the hands of jihadist groups that could threaten Israel and other U.S. allies has tempered the willingness to open the arms floodgates. Although the U.S. Congress authorized arming the rebels earlier this year, much of the equipment hasn’t reached the rebels.

Now, the alleged chemical weapons attack on a Syrian suburb seems to have overridden past qualms about not getting in too deep. Cruise missile strikes may not shift the battlefield, but it could embroil the U.S. further into the war while doing little to calm the refugee and humanitarian crises.

2. Iran

The Obama administration’s pitch to lawmakers to convince them bombing Syria is a good idea centers on the alleged threat from Iran. They have been telling Congress it’s important to send a message to Iran about its own nuclear energy program. And hawkish U.S. politicians have long framed the Syrian crisis as an opportunity to strike a blow at Iran.

There’s a reason for all the focus on Iran: it's a crucial ally of the Assad regime. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, the two countries have been largely united by the common political goals of opposition to the U.S. and Israel, though there have been rough patches in their partnership. For Iran, Syria is a crucial foothold in the Arab world and a conduit for arming the Lebanese group Hezbollah. Iran has poured billions of dollars of investments in Syria. And during the Syrian civil war, Iran has been a key force helping Assad stay in power. Iranian Revolutionary Guard troops have reportedly fought on the side of Assad.

The Iranian leadership is opposed to a U.S. strike on Syria, though Iran’s past with chemical weapons has led officials to denounce their use in the civil war without explicitly assigning blame. The potential U.S. strike on Syria could impact hopes of rapprochement between Iran and the U.S.—hopes that have intensified since the election of Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani earlier this year.

3. Hezbollah

Closely linked to Iran’s involvement in Syria is Hezbollah’s even greater involvement. The Lebanese militant group that grew out of resisting the Israeli occupation of Lebanon and won the praise of Arabs in various countries for that feat is a key ally of Iran and Syria. Iran provided the arms that made Hezbollah such a potent force because Syria allowed it to do so. Now, Hezbollah is deeply enmeshed in the Syrian civil war, acting as an effective fighting force to keep Assad in power. Hezbollah sees the survival of the Assad regime as crucial to its own survival.

Since the civil war started, there have long been reports of Hezbollah fighters backing Assad. But it was decisively confirmed in May 2013, when Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah gave a speech casting the Syrian conflict as a battle against America, Israel and the radical Sunni jihadists he claimed they were backing. Hezbollah fighters were sent to fight alongside Syrian forces in the strategic town of Qusayr, and in June Syria captured the town from rebels.

Hezbollah’s actions have been controversial within Lebanon, with some questioning why Hezbollah is fighting other Arabs instead of Israel. And the war has followed Hezbollah back home. Lebanon—which, like Syria, is composed of various competing ethnic and religious groups—was beset by intense fighting between sides who back different players in Syria over the summer. Car bombs have targeted Lebanese Shiite neighborhoods, where Hezbollah’s power is the strongest. And refugees have flowed into Lebanon, adding considerable economic and political strain to the country.

4. Israel

Israel and Syria have a complicated relationship. Officially, they are enemies. Syria was one of a handful of Arab states that fought Israel in a number of wars, most notably the 1967 war, when Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria and occupied it ever since. In a move never recognized by the international community, Israel annexed the part of Golan it controlled in 1981, and it has built illegal settlements in the Israeli-controlled side of the area. It has long been a Syrian goal to regain the Golan Heights, and negotiations between the two sides have accelerated over the past decade with that goal in mind. But they have not been successful, and Israel continues to control part of the Heights.

The Syrian regime has long used anti-Israel rhetoric as a rallying cry to bolster its own legitimacy. But that rhetoric has never matched military action to retake the Golan. And Israel has been perfectly content with the Assad regime’s rule, since it provided much needed stability on its border with Syria, though Syria has backed Israel’s more potent enemies, Hamas and Hezbollah, though the relationship with Hamas has frayed since the Palestinian group announced it was supporting the uprising against Assad.

Israel’s preferred outcome of the conflict is to have no solution at all—to have both sides, neither of whom Israel particularly likes, fight and bleed each other dry. Although the fall of the Syrian regime would greatly weaken Hezbollah and Iran, Israel is wary of the prospect of radical Islamists who are willing to turn their arms toward the Jewish state.

The most decisive action Israel has taken has been to bomb Syria as the regime sought to transfer weapons to Hezbollah. Israel has launched airstrikes on Syria three times since the uprising began. But those strikes were not aimed at toppling Assad.

Now, Israel is backing U.S. bombs on Syria, and supplied intelligence to the U.S. to make its chemical weapons case. But its willingness to see U.S. intervention is more about Iran than Syria. Israel wants the U.S. to show Iran that a “red line” crossed would mean military action. That’s why the pro-Israel U.S. lobbying group, American Israel Public Affairs Committee, is also backing U.S. strikes on Syria.

5. Russia

While the U.S. has only tepidly backed the overthrow of Assad, Russia has decisively backed the Assad regime. Russia has vetoed every UN Security Council attempt to take action against the Assad regime. It is also steadfastly opposed to any military action against Assad, and retains close political and intelligence links to the Syrian regime.

Russia’s close ties to Syria dates to a Cold War-era alliance, but the collapse of the Soviet Union did not end the relationship. Russia’s only naval base in the Mediterranean is located in Syria, providing it a military foothold outside of its normal purview and a sphere of some influence in the Middle East. Syria is also a frequent buyer of Russian arms. Furthermore, Russia also has its own reasons to worry about the radical Islamists who are part of the rebel groups in Syria. Russia has battled an Islamist-fueled insurgency in Chechnya, and it’s wary of any similar group gaining power.

Lastly, as former U.S. intelligence officer Wayne White explains, Russia “may well view supporting Bashar al-Assad as yet another way of expressing displeasure with much of the criticism they have received from Washington predating the Syrian uprising, and demonstrating that their Middle East policy is not subject to American approval.”

6. Saudi Arabia

This theocratic monarchy and close U.S. ally has been a crucial node of opposition to the Arab Spring in many countries. But in Syria, Saudi Arabia would like nothing more than to see the Assad regime fall in order to install a Sunni Arab regime friendly to Saudi interests. And they’re forcefully backing the prospect of U.S. military action.

Saudi Arabia’s preoccupation in recent years has been Iran. Both powers have their own spheres of influence, and are locked in a battle for regional hegemony. So they see the downfall of the Assad regime as a decisive blow against Iran’s government.

Saudi Arabia has translated this desire into action. It has funded and armed Syrian rebels, including to Islamists. (Qatar, another oil-rich country, is backing its own group of rebels, and these also include jihadists.) A small number of Saudis funded by rich compatriots have also flocked to Syria to fight the Assad regime.

Alex Kane is AlterNet's New York-based World editor, and an assistant editor for Mondoweiss. Follow him on Twitter @alexbkane.

Nicolas J. S. Davies is author of Blood On Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. He wrote the chapter on "Obama At War" for the just released book, Grading the 44th President: A Report Card on Barack Obama's First Term as a Progressive Leader.

As the Obama administration presses ahead with its mission to punish the Syrian government for its alleged gassing of civilians in suburban Damascus, the particulars of the attack remain unclear. All too clear, though, is the role of the United States as a supplier, supporter and even employer of a wide range of weapons of mass destruction, including sarin gas, resulting in the death and illness of not only those considered our enemies, but our “heroes” too.

The 1960s and 1970s

Agent Orange

The US military’s widespread and long-term use of the defoliant Agent Orange to destroy Vietnamese jungles is among the best known and most anguishing chapters in modern chemical warfare. Published articles had demonstrated the health and environmental dangers of the chemical components of Agent Orange (so called for the orange-striped barrels in which it was shipped) for a full decade preceding the war. In 1952, Monsanto (which along with Dow Chemicals was the principal manufacturer) informed the government of the dangerous byproduct resulting from heating the chemical mix—namely dioxin. Yet we proceeded to employ Agent Orange, denying for decades the death and illness inflicted on Vietnamese and Americans alike. As the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph by AP photographer Nick Ut documented, we used the incendiaries napalm and white phosphorus in Vietnam.

As Seymour Hersh revealed in his groundbreaking 1968 reporting, we provided the South Vietnamese with the lethal arsenic-containing gas DM, claiming it was a “tear” gas for riot control, though the Field Manual clearly stated "not approved in any operations where deaths are not acceptable.” Throughout the war, Hersh and others continued to document the US use of gases, incendiaries and Agent Orange and other herbicidals to destroy not only Vietnam’s jungles but its food supply—a crime against humanity and nature.

Project SHAD

Totally unknown till 35 years after the Vietnam War was the DoD’s Project Shipboard Hazard and Defense (SHAD), a highly classified program, which from 1962 to 1971 tested whether US warships and their troops could withstand attacks from chemical and biological weapons. From overhead planes and nearby aircraft carriers, the military aimed lethal gases at ships carrying mostly unsuspecting sailors and marines. In the 1990s, veterans stationed on SHAD boats reported respiratory conditions and cancers only to be told by VA that nothing called Project SHAD had ever existed. Finally, after CBS broke the story in May 2001, the Department of Defense admitted to SHAD’s existence and its almost decade-long program of toxic testing.

Project Tailwind

In 1998, a CNN two-part Sunday night news report revealed that a special commando unit in 1970 used sarin gas in Laos to kill American defectors. The story about “Operation Tailwind” was researched, written and produced by seasoned journalists April Oliver and Jack Smith, with help from Pulitzer Prize-winning Peter Arnett, who narrated the broadcast. Under pressure from Henry Kissinger and others, many claim, CNN retracted the story, and fired Oliver and Smith, and Arnett soon after. (Newsroom's Aaron Sorkin recently explained on the Daily Show that he used "Operation Tailwind” as the basis of the second season’s centerpiece, Operation Genoa, a secret mission set in Pakistan, in which the US supposedly used sarin against civilians. CNN's reporting, Sorkin told John Oliver, offered an intriguing example of journalism gone awry with compromising research and doctored videos.)

The story of Operation Tailwind has never been proven wrong, as Jennifer Epps persuasively documented recently on the Daily Kos. According to Oliver and Smith, the story’s prime source, Admiral Thomas Moorer, read and signed off on the script; and according to Reese Schonfeld, CNN’s co-founder, Moorer stated in a legal deposition that he had said what the journalists quoted him as saying. Even CNN’s attorneys Floyd Abrams and David Kohler “found no credible evidence at all of any falsification of an intentional nature at any point in the journalistic process….We do not believe it can reasonably be suggested that any of the information on which the broadcast was based was fabricated or nonexistent." The attorneys asserted that high-level and reliable military personnel had been confidential sources for the story. Yet the story was pulled and the journalists fired.

The 1980s and 1990s

Reagan and Bush I's Dual-Use Double Dealing

The 1991 Gulf War followed almost a decade of the Reagan-Bush I administration's active support of Iraq in its war against the newly established Islamic Republic of Iran. The US supplied Iraq with financing, intelligence and supplies for a protracted war with Iran, in which chemical weapons played a significant role. “Iraqgate”—in which we used other countries and their banks to transfer war funds and materials to Iraq—became a considerable though fleeting scandal in 1989-'90. But Reagan’s and then Bush’s use of US government agencies to funnel materials and technology that could be used to create and disperse chemical and biological weapons remains a little known chapter in the history of US warfare. Dual-use materials and technologies—normally used for civilian purposes but with ready military applications—were central to the program. Overseen by the Department of Commerce, the secret program allowed massive export to Iraq items such as agricultural toxin, and “crop duster” equipped helicopters, ostensibly to kill weeds and insects, but used to kill people.

In 1983, as the State Department was reporting Iraq’s manufacture and use of nerve gas, Donald Rumsfeld, Reagan’s special envoy to Iraq, was in Baghdad negotiating the resumption of normal diplomatic relations with Iraq, which were formalized soon after. In 1988, with clear evidence that Iraq had used sarin and other nerve gases on the Kurdish village of Halabja, killing up to 5,000 civilians, the US government did nothing: The State Department advanced the bogus story that Iran was partly to blame. In 1989, the Bechtel corporation, on whose board Rumsfeld sat, won a contract with Iraq to construct a new chemical plant that expanded its ability to produce sarin and other chemical weapons.

The 1994 “Riegle Report” issued by the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs chaired by Donald Riegle Jr, documented that the Commerce Department had issued 771 licenses to US companies to export war-related products including the chemical materials used to make mustard gas and sarin and pathogens causing anthrax and bubonic plague. A recent article in Foreign Policy has revealed that newly-declassified CIA files provide ample evidence of the US’ close involvement with Saddam’s gas warfare program. “They are tantamount to an official American admission of complicity in some of the most gruesome chemical weapons attacks ever launched,” authors Shane Harris and Matthew Aid write.

Replacing Vietnam Syndrome with Gulf War Syndrome

On Feb. 28, 1991, as the Persian Gulf War fighting ended, then President George Herbert Walker Bush declared, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all,” referring to the American public's dismay over the decade-long Vietnam War in which almost 58,000 US troops died. But ultimately Bush I’s Operation Desert Storm, a five-week war with only 148 US battle casualties, spawned a real health syndrome from which some 250,000 US veterans still suffer.

The 1991 Gulf War and our more recent wars in the region have released a catastrophic cocktail of chemicals, microbes and radiation. Depleted uranium (DU) —the byproduct of uranium enrichment—made its debut in the Gulf War, the ordinance of choice for bullets, grenades and cluster bombs. Extensive in vitro research by Alexandra Miller and others has documented DU altering genes and changing normal cells into cancerous cells. The increased incidence of birth defects and cancers in Iraq has been widely reported and linked to DU. At home, veterans groups, advocacy groups for children with birth defects, and researchers have reported higher rates of  birth defects in children of Gulf War veterans, including facial and heart malformations.

The Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Illness, a congressionally mandated panel of scientists, has not ruled out DU as a contributor to Gulf War Illness, the multi-symptom, multi-system disease afflicting a third of Desert Storm veterans. Not surprisingly, researchers have reported higher cancer rates of Gulf War veterans and made linkages between DU exposure and cancer. But RAC’s 2008 report found the clearest culprit of the extreme pain, chronic fatigue, headaches, memory loss, and movement disorders prominent in GWI to be US-released neurotoxins. RAC implicated a certain type of chemical (acetylcholinesterase inhibitors) common to experimental anti-nerve gas pre-treatment pills, bug spray and sarin, which troops were exposed to when the US bombed munitions storage facilities in southern Iraq.

The Pentagon has not denied the explosion of sarin, but has maintained the gas could not have reached the troops, who were stationed at US bases in Saudi Arabia. Recently, longtime Gulf War illness researcher, epidemiologist Robert Haley and former military investigator James Tuitte have shown weather satellite images of the plume’s course, ending in the sky above the Saudi bases. The many nerve gas alarms that were going off at the time, troops were told, were false alarms. But they were not, the authors say, demonstrating a direct connection between the number of nerve gas alarms troops heard and the severity of Gulf War Illness symptoms.

The sarin explosions Haley and Tuitte write about occurred in January 1991. On March 4 and March 10, we again bombed military facilities in southern Iraq, exploding open pits of sarin-loaded rockets. The Pentagon does not deny the deed, but its logs for the period between March 4 through March 10 are missing. (Its excuse: the individual who kept the log was off for the week.)

The media coverage of Haley and Tuitte’s findings was limited and brief. Now a big story has claimed the world’s attention: another Arab dictator has purportedly killed his own people with chemical weapons—and the US, as the leader of the civilized world, says it cannot stand by.

We will “degrade” Assad’s chemical weapons arsenal, secretaries Kerry and Hagel have stated. Wasn’t that what we meant to do when we bombed Saddam’s weapon depots, poisoning hundreds of thousands of American and Czech troops, and who knows how many Iraqis and Saudis? The Syrian government may or may not have done what the Obama administration is claiming. The US may or may not bomb Syria. What is certain, though, is that the United States has its own dark history with biological and chemicals weapons, which we ignore at our peril.

I know I’m dating myself by writing this, but I remember the middle class.

I grew up in an automaking town in the 1970s, when it was still possible for a high school graduate — or even a high school dropout — to get a job on an assembly line and earn more money than a high school teacher.

“I had this student,” my history teacher once told me, “a real chucklehead. Just refused to study. Dropped out of school, a year or so later, he came back to see me. He pointed out the window at a brand-new Camaro and said, ‘That’s my car.’ Meanwhile, I was driving a beat-up station wagon. I think he was an electrician’s assistant or something. He handed light bulbs to an electrician.”

In our neighbors’ driveways, in their living rooms, in their backyards, I saw the evidence of prosperity distributed equally among the social classes: speedboats, Corvette Stingrays, waterbeds, snowmobiles, motorcycles, hunting rifles, RVs, CB radios. I’ve always believed that the ’70s are remembered as the Decade That Taste Forgot because they were a time when people without culture or education had the money to not only indulge their passions, but flaunt them in front of the entire nation. It was an era, to use the title of a 1975 sociological study of a Wisconsin tavern, of blue-collar aristocrats.

That all began to change in the 1980s. The recession at the beginning of that decade – America’s first Great Recession – was the beginning of the end for the bourgeois proletariat. Steelworkers showed up for first shift to find padlocks on mill gates. Autoworkers were laid off for years. The lucky ones were transferred to plants far from home. The unlucky never built another car.

When I was growing up, it was assumed that America’s shared prosperity was the natural endpoint of our economy’s development, that capitalism had produced the workers paradise to which Communism unsuccessfully aspired. Now, with the perspective of 40 years, it’s obvious that the nonstop economic expansion that lasted from the end of World War II to the Arab oil embargo of 1973 was a historical fluke, made possible by the fact that the United States was the only country to emerge from that war with its industrial capacity intact. Unfortunately, the middle class – especially the blue-collar middle class – is also starting to look like a fluke, an interlude between Gilded Ages that more closely reflects the way most societies structure themselves economically. For the majority of human history – and in the majority of countries today – there have been only two classes: aristocracy and peasantry. It’s an order in which the many toil for subsistence wages to provide luxuries for the few. Twentieth century America temporarily escaped this stratification, but now, as statistics on economic inequality demonstrate, we’re slipping back in that direction. Between 1970 and today, the share of the nation’s income that went to the middle class – households earning two-thirds to double the national median – fell from 62 percent to 45 percent. Last year, the wealthiest 1 percent took in 19 percent of America’s income – their highest share since 1928. It’s as though the New Deal and the modern labor movement never happened.

Here’s the story of a couple whose working lives began during the Golden Age of middle-class employment, and are ending in this current age of inequality. Gary Galipeau was born in Syracuse, N.Y., in the baby boom sweet spot of 1948. At age 19, he hired in at his hometown’s flagship business, the Carrier Corp., which gave Syracuse the title “Air-Conditioning Capital of the World.” Starting at $2.37 an hour, Galipeau worked his way into the skilled trades, eventually becoming a metal fabricator earning 10 times his original wage.

“Understand,” he said, “in the mid-’60s, you could figuratively roll out of bed and find a manufacturing job.”

Voss joined Carrier after dropping out of Syracuse University, and getting laid off from an industrial laundry.

“It was 1978,” she said. “You could still go from factory to factory. One day, a friend and I were looking for a job. We saw this big building. We said, ‘Must be jobs in there.’ In those days, you could fill out an application and get an interview the same day. I was offered a job within three or four days, making window units. I sprayed glue on fiberglass insulation, stuck it inside units – 400 a day, nearly one a minute. I was told, ‘After five years, you’ll have a job for life. You’ll be golden.’”

Galipeau and Voss, who met working at Carrier, lost their jobs in 2004, when the company moved the last of its Syracuse manufacturing operations to Singapore. There, even the most skilled workers were paid half the $27 an hour Galipeau had earned as a metalworker. The corporation they’d expected to spend their careers with divorced them in middle age, and now they had to bridge the years until Social Security and Medicare. Eligible for Trade Adjustment Assistance, because her job had moved overseas, Voss earned a two-year degree in health information technology – “a fancy way of saying medical records.”

Even with the degree, Voss couldn’t find decent-paying work in healthcare, so she took a job with a sump pump manufacturer, for $12.47 an hour — a substantial drop from Carrier, but decent money for Central New York in the A.D. of A/C. (The No. 1 employer of ex-Carrier workers is an Iroquois casino.) Less than two weeks into the new job, a thread on Voss’ work glove wrapped itself around a drill press, taking Voss’ finger with it. The digit was torn off at the first knuckle. When Voss returned to work, two months later, she found the factory so distressing that she soon took a medical records job in a hospital, paying $2.50 an hour less.

After earning a degree in human resources management, Galipeau found that 56 was too old to start a new career. Fortunate enough to draw a full pension from Carrier, Galipeau took a part-time job at a supermarket meat counter, for the health insurance. Syracuse’s leading vocations are now education and medicine – the training of the young and the preservation of the old. Where nothing is left for the middle-aged, or the middle class, it’s difficult to be both.

The shrinking of the middle class is not a failure of capitalism. It’s a failure of government. Capitalism has been doing exactly what it was designed to do: concentrating wealth in the ownership class, while providing the mass of workers with just enough wages to feed, house and clothe themselves. Young people who graduate from college to $9.80 an hour jobs as sales clerks or data processors are giving up on the concept of employment as a vehicle for improving their financial fortunes: In a recent survey, 24 percent defined the American dream as “not being in debt.” They’re not trying to get ahead. They’re just trying to get to zero.

That’s the natural drift of the relationship between capital and labor, and it can only be arrested by an activist government that chooses to step in as a referee. The organizing victories that founded the modern union movement were made possible by the National Labor Relations Act, a piece of New Deal legislation guaranteeing workers the right to bargain collectively. The plotters of the 1936-37 Flint Sit Down Strike, which gave birth to the United Auto Workers, tried to time their action to coincide with the inauguration of Frank Murphy, Michigan’s newly elected New Deal governor. Murphy dispatched the National Guard to Flint, but instead of ordering his guardsmen to throw the workers out of the plants, as he legally could have done, he ordered them to ensure the workers remained safely inside. The strike resulted in a nickel an hour raise and an end to arbitrary firings. It guaranteed the success of the UAW, whose high wages and benefits set the standard for American workers for the next 45 years. (I know a Sit Down Striker who died on Sept. 17, at 98 years old, an age he might not have attained without the lifetime health benefits won by the UAW.)

The United States will never again be as wealthy as it was in the 1950s and ’60s. Never again will 18-year-olds graduate directly from high school to jobs that pay well enough to buy a house and support a family. (Even the auto plants now demand a few years in junior college.) That was inevitable, due to the recovery of our World War II enemies, and automation that enables 5,000 workers to build the same number of cars that once required 25,000 hands. What was not inevitable was the federal government withdrawing its supervision of the economy at the precise moment Americans began to need it more than at any time since the Great Depression.

The last president who had a plan for protecting American workers from the vicissitudes of the global economy was Richard Nixon, who was in office when foreign steel and foreign cars began seriously competing with domestic products. The most farsighted politician of his generation, Nixon realized that America’s economic hegemony was coming to an end, and was determined to cushion the decline by a) preventing foreign manufacturers from overrunning our markets and b) teaching Americans to live within their new limits. When the United States began running a trade deficit, Nixon tried to reverse the trend with a 10 percent tariff on imported products. After the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo suddenly increased the price of gasoline from 36 cents to 53 cents a gallon (and just as suddenly increased the demand for fuel-efficient German and Japanese cars), Nixon lowered the speed limit to 55 miles an hour and introduced the Corporate Average Fuel Economy law, which gave automakers until 1985 to double their fleetwide fuel efficiency to 27.5 miles per gallon.

Had Nixon survived Watergate, he might have set the nation on a course that emphasized government regulation of the economy, and trade protection as a response to globalism. We might also have preserved more of the manufacturing base necessary for a strong middle class. But his successors dismantled that vision, beginning with Jimmy Carter, an economically conservative Southern planter. Nixon’s answer to inflation had been wage and price controls, an intrusion into the free market that would be unimaginable today. Carter deregulated the airline, rail and trucking industries, hoping that competition would result in lower prices. It didn’t, but it gave the newly liberated companies more leverage against their unions. When inflation nonetheless reached 14 percent, Carter’s hand-picked Federal Reserve Board chairman, Paul Volcker, responded by tightening the money supply, raising interest rates so high that Americans could not afford loans for cars or houses. Ronald Reagan also chose low prices over employment, refusing to free up money until inflation declined. Car sales hit a 20-year low. In the fall of 1982, the national unemployment rate was 10.8 percent, the highest since the Great Depression. Walter Mondale accused Reagan of turning the Midwest into “a rust bowl” – a term reformulated to Rust Belt. Buffalo, Cleveland, Flint and Detroit still haven’t recovered. Neither has the middle class.

“You can’t grow an economy, grow a middle class, without making things, producing stuff,” says Mike Stout, a steelworker who lost his job when Pennsylvania’s Homestead Works closed in 1986. “It’s just impossible. I haven’t seen it anywhere.”

Reagan also fired the striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization. He argued that he was simply trying to end an illegal strike by public employees, but his action encouraged private employers to use the same tactic. Once workers realized they could lose their jobs by joining a picket line, the number of strikes dropped tenfold, from 300 a year before 1981, to 30 a year today.

Pre-PATCO, 21 percent of workers belonged to unions (still down from the all-time high of 30 percent). Now, fewer than 12 percent do. Union membership is at 14.7 million, the lowest total since just before World War II. There’s a well-known graph that shows middle-class income share declining along the same axis as unionization.

Bill Clinton continued down the same deregulatory path, signing the North American Free Trade Agreement and the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which prohibited commercial banks from owning investment firms.

NAFTA, which resulted in hundreds of small manufacturers moving to Mexico, was passed over the vehement objections of labor.

In 1994, Rep. Glenn Poshard of Illinois tried to persuade the Labor Department to intervene in a lockout at the A.E. Staley Mfg. Co., a Decatur corn starch manufacturer that had been bought by Tate and Lyle, a London-based food conglomerate. Poshard considered the dispute the “flashpoint” for the new economic globalism of the 1990s, but when he took a group of workers to meet Labor Secretary Robert Reich, the secretary gave no indication the federal government would try to settle the matter.

After two-and-a-half years, the union capitulated, settling for a third of its pre-lockout jobs.

Only in 2008, after the bubble of false prosperity created by easy credit and inflated housing values blew up, did two presidents finally take an active role in the economy. George W. Bush decided he didn’t want to be remembered as the president who allowed American automakers to fall apart, and sent them $17.4 billion of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout money. Barack Obama finished the job, setting up an auto task force to guide General Motors and Chrysler through bankruptcy. (He did so over the objections of his house Clintonite, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Emanuel’s response to the prospect of tens of thousands of autoworkers losing their jobs: “Fuck the UAW”). Even so, new autoworkers now start at $14 an hour – hardly a middle-class wage.

Obama also passed the Affordable Care Act, the most significant piece of social welfare legislation since the Great Society, but author Peter Beinart still thinks Obama belongs to the modern tradition of small government presidents, calling his politics “pro-capitalist, anti-bureaucratic, Reaganized liberalism.”

The lesson of the last 40 years is that we can’t depend on the free market to sustain a middle class. It’s not going to happen without government intervention. Even when American industry dominated the world, one reason workers prospered was that the economy operated on New Deal underpinnings, which included legal protections for labor unions, government regulation of industry and high marginal income tax rates.

It’s time to declare an end to the deregulatory experiment that has resulted in the greatest disparity between the top earners and the middle earners in nearly a century. Now that the New Deal has been vanquished – a goal conservatives have cherished since before Robert Taft went extinct – we need a Newer Deal that will raise the minimum wage, reduce obstacles to union organizing, levy higher taxes on passive wealth such as investments and inheritances, and provide benefits for workers unable to obtain it at their jobs, perhaps by lowering Medicaid eligibility or instituting a single-payer health system. The demand for such reforms is brewing. We heard from the middle class during the Occupy movement of 2011, and from the lower class in this year’s fast food strikes.

Not long ago, I was in Flint, Mich., to meet with its new congressman, Dan Kildee. No American city has suffered more during the Age of Deregulation than Flint. In 1978, Flint had 80,000 automaking jobs, and the highest per capita income in the nation. Today, it has 6,000 automaking jobs, and the highest murder rate in the English-speaking world. Instead of Corvettes and speedboats, the yards are filled with mean dogs, “This Property Protected by Smith & Wesson” signs, and weeds. So far, Kildee’s biggest achievement has been securing federal funding to tear down 2,000 abandoned houses. In Flint, where the average home sale price is $15,000, eliminating blight increases property values. Having seen the consequences of government indifference, Kildee wants to return to the days of government activism. As county treasurer, he founded a public land bank that helped revive downtown Flint by purchasing and renovating a hotel that had sat empty since 1973.

“It is a myth that there is any market that is not supported or affected by the structure of government in one way or another,” he said. “We’re picking winners and losers right now, and we’re picking the wrong ones. We’re making matters worse by not intervening in these communities. It’s not fine for Flint to be one of the losers, as far as I’m concerned.”

As far as I’m concerned, it’s not fine for the middle class to be one of the losers, either.

The following was a speech delivered on September 1, 2013 at the founding convention of UNIFOR, a new mega union created by the Canadian Autoworkers and the Canadian Energy and Paper Workers Union. 

I’m so very happy and honoured to be able to share this historic day with you.

The energy in this room -- and the hope the founding of this new union has inspired across the country – is contagious.

It feels like this could be the beginning of the fight back we have all been waiting for, the one that will chase Harper from power and restore the power of working people in Canada.

So welcome to the world UNIFOR.

A lot of your media coverage so far has focused on how big UNIFOR is -- the biggest private sector union in Canada. And when you are facing as many attacks as workers are in this country, being big can be very helpful. But big is not a victory in itself.

The victory comes when this giant platform you have just created becomes a place to think big, to dream big, to make big demands and take big actions. The kind of actions that will shift the public imagination and change our sense of what is possible.

And it’s that kind of “big” that I want to talk to you about today.

Some of you are familiar with a book I wrote called The Shock Doctrine. It argues that over the past 35 years, corporate interests have systematically exploited various forms of mass crises – economic shocks, natural disasters, wars – in order to ram through policies that enrich a small elite, by shredding regulations, cutting social spending and forcing large-scale privatizations.

As Jim Stanford and Fred Wilson argue in their paper laying out UNIFOR’s vision, the attacks working people in Canada and around the world are facing right now are a classic case of The Shock Doctrine.

There’s no shortage of examples, from the mass slashing of salaries and layoffs of public sector workers in Greece, to the attacks on pension funds in Detroit in the midst of a cooked up bankruptcy, to the Harper government’s scapegoating of unions for its own policy failures right here in Canada.

I don’t want to spend my time with you proving that this ugly tactic of exploiting public fear for private gain is alive and well. You know it is; you are living it.

I want to talk about how we fight it.

And I’ll be honest with you: when I wrote the book, I thought that just understanding how the tactic worked, and mobilizing to resist it, would be enough to stop it. We even had a slogan: “Information is shock resistance. Arm yourself.”

But I have to admit something to you: I was wrong. Just knowing what is happening – just rejecting their story, saying to the politicians and bankers: “No, you created this crisis, not us” or “No, we’re not broke, it’s just that you are hording all the money” may be true but it’s not enough.

It’s not even enough when you can mobilize millions of people in the streets to shout “We won’t pay for your crisis.” Because let’s face it – we’ve seen massive mobilizations against austerity in Greece, Spain, Italy, France, Britain. We’ve occupied Wall Street and Bay Street and countless other streets. And yet the attacks keep coming.

Some of the new movements that have emerged in recent years have staying power, but too many of them arrive, raise huge hopes, and then seem to disappear or fizzle out.

The reason is simple. We are trying to organize in the rubble of a 30 year war that has been waged on the collective sphere and workers rights. The young people in the streets are the children of that war.

And the war has been so complete, so successful, that too often these social movements don’t have anywhere to stand. They have to occupy a park or a square to have a meeting. Or they are able to build a power base in their schools, but that base is transient by its nature, they are out in a few years.

This transience makes these movements far too easy to evict simply by waiting them out, or by applying brute state force, which is what has happened in far too many cases.

And this is one of the many reasons why the creation of UNIFOR, and your promise of reviving Social Unionism - building not just a big union but a vast and muscular network of social movements – has raised so much hope.

Because our movements need each other.

The new social movements bring a lot to the table – the ability to mobilize huge numbers of people, real diversity, a willingness to take big risks, as well as new methods of organizing including a commitment to deep democracy.

But these movements also need you – they need your institutional strength, your radical history, and perhaps most of all, your ability to act as an anchor so that we don’t keep rising up and floating away.

We need you to be our fixed address, our base, so that next time we are impossible to evict.

And we also need your organizing skills. We need to figure out together how to build sturdy new collective structures in the rubble of neoliberalism. Your innovative idea of community chapters is a terrific start.

It’s also important to remember that you are not starting from scratch. A remarkable group of people gathered a little less than a year ago for the Port Elgin Assembly and produced what they called the Making Waves agenda.

The most important message to come out of that process is that our coalitions cannot just be about top-down agreements between leaders; the change has to come from the bottom up, with full engagement from members.

And that means investing in education. Education about the ideological and structural reasons why we have ended up where we are. If we are going to build a new world, our foundation must be solid.

It also means getting out there and talking to people face to face. Not just the public, not just the media, but re-invigorating your own members with the analysis we share.

But there’s something else too. Another reason why we can’t seem to win big victories against the Shock Doctrine.

Even when there is mass resistance to an austerity agenda, and even when we understand how we got here, something is stopping us – collectively – from fully rejecting the neoliberal agenda.

And I think what it is is that we don’t fully believe that it’s possible to build something in its place. For my generation, and younger, deregulation, privatization and cutbacks is all we’ve ever known.

We have little experience building or dreaming. Only defending. And this is what I’ve come to understand as the key to fighting the Shock Doctrine.

We can’t just reject the dominant story about how the world works. We need our own story about what it could be.

We can’t just reject their lies. We need truths so powerful that their lies dissolve on contact with them. We can’t just reject their project. We need our own project.

Harper's One Idea

Now, we know Stephen Harper’s project – he has only one idea for how to build our economy.

Dig lots of holes, lay lots of pipe. Stick the stuff from the pipes onto ships – or trucks, or railway cars – and take it to places where it will be refined and burned. Repeat, but more and faster. Before anyone figures out that this is his one idea, and what has allowed him to maintain the illusion that he is some kind of responsible economic manager, while the rest of the economy falls apart.

It’s why it’s so important to this government to accelerate oil and gas production at an outrageous pace, and why it has declared war on everyone standing in the way, whether environmentalists or First Nations or other communities.

It’s also why the Harper government is willing to sacrifice the manufacturing base of this country, waging war on workers, attacking your most basic collective rights.

This is not just about extracting specific resources – Harper represents an extreme version of a particular worldview. One that I sometimes call “extractivism”. And others times simply call capitalism.

Extractivism

It’s an approach to the world based on taking and taking without giving back. Taking as if there are no limits to what can be taken– no limits to what workers’ bodies can take, no limits to what a functioning society can take, no limits to what the planet can take.

In the extractivist mindset, labour is a commodity just like the bitumen. And maximum value must be extracted from that resource – ie you and your members – regardless of the collateral damage. To health, families, social fabric, human rights.

When crisis hits, there is only ever one solution: take some more, faster. On all fronts.

So that is their story – the one we’re trapped in. The one they use as a weapon against all of us.

And if we are going to defeat it, we need our own story.

Climate Change -- Don't Look Away

So I want to offer you what I believe to be the most powerful counter-narrative to that brutal logic that we have ever had.

Here it is: our current economic model is not only waging war on workers, on communities, on public services and social safety nets. It’s waging war on the life support systems of the planet itself. The conditions for life on earth.

Climate change. It’s not an “issue” for you to add to the list of things to worry about it. It is a civilizational wake up call. A powerful message – spoken in the language of fires, floods, storms and droughts -- telling us that we need an entirely new economic model, one based on justice and sustainability.

It’s telling us that when you take you must also give, that there are limits past which we cannot push, that our future health lies not in digging ever deeper holes but in digging deeper inside ourselves – to understand how ALL our fates are interconnected.

Oh, and one last thing. We need to make this transition, like, yesterday. Because our emissions are going in exactly the wrong direction and there’s very little time left.

Now I know talking about climate change can be a little uncomfortable for those of you working in the extractive industries, or in manufacturing sectors producing carbon-intensive products like cars and planes.

I also know that despite your personal fears, you haven’t joined the deniers like some of your counterparts in the U.S. – both of your former unions have all kinds of great climate policies on the books.

And this isn’t some recent conversion either: the CEP courageously fought for Kyoto all the way back in the 90s. The CAW has been fighting against the environmental destruction of free trade deals even longer. [Former CEP President] Dave Coles even got arrested protesting the Keystone XL pipeline. That was heroic.

But…how to say this politely?...I think it’s fair to say that climate change hasn’t traditionally been your members greatest passion.

And I can relate: I’m not an environmentalist. I’ve spent my adult life fighting for economic justice, inside our country and between countries. I opposed the WTO not because of its effects on dolphins but because of its effects on people, and on our democracy.

The case I want to make to you is that climate change – when its full economic and moral implications are understood -- is the most powerful weapon progressives have ever had in the fight for equality and social justice.

But first, we have to stop running away from the climate crisis, stop leaving it to the environmentalist, and look at it. Let ourselves absorb the fact that the industrial revolution that led to our society’s prosperity is now destabilizing the natural systems on which all of life depends.

I’m not going to bore you with a whole bunch of numbers. Though I could remind you that the World Bank says we’re on track for a four degrees warmer world. That the International Energy Agency –not exactly a protest camp of green radicals – says the Bank is being too optimistic and we’re actually in for 6 degrees of warming this century, with “catastrophic implications for all of us”. That’s an understatement: we haven’t even reached a full degree of warming yet and look at what is already happening.

Climate Change Is Happening Now

97% of the Greenland ice-sheet's surface was melting last summer – as Bill McKibben says, we’ve taken one of the great features of the planet and broken it.

And then there are the extreme weather events. Hell, I was in Fort McMurray [Alberta] this summer and the contents of the town’s museum – literally, its history – was floating around in the water. 

I was trying to get interviews with the big oil companies but their headquarters in Calgary were all empty as the downtown was dark and the city was frantically bailing out from the worst flood it has ever seen.

And not even the provincial NDP had the courage to say: this is what climate change looks like and we are going to have a lot more of it if those oil companies get their way.

We know that this climate emergency is only getting more dire. And our excuses about why we can’t do anything about it – why it’s somebody else’s issue – are melting away.

But engaging on climate does not mean dropping everything else you are doing and turning into a raving environmentalist.

Because I know that the fights you are already waging against austerity, against new free trade deals, against attacks on unions have never been more important.

Which is why I’m not calling you to drop anything.

Climate Change Is at the Heart of all Our Existing Demands

My argument is that the climate threat makes the need to fight austerity all the more pressing, since we need public services and public infrastructure to both bring down our emissions and prepare for the coming storms.

Far from trumping other issues, climate change vindicates much of what the left has been demanding for decades.

In fact, climate change turbo-charges our existing demands and gives them a basis in hard science. It calls on us to be bold, to get ambitious, to win this time because we really cannot afford any more losses. It enflames our vision of a better world with existential urgency.

What I’m going to show you is that confronting the climate crisis requires that we break every rule in the free-market playbook -- and that we do so with great urgency.

Climate Action = The Left Agenda

So I’m going to quickly lay out what I believe a genuine climate action plan would look like. And it’s not the market-driven non-sense we hear from some of the big green groups in the U.S. – changing your light bulbs, or carbon trading and offsetting. This is the real deal, getting at the heart of why our emissions are soaring.

And you will notice that a lot this will sound familiar. That’s because much of this agenda is already embraced in the vision of your new union, not to mention everything you have been fighting for in the past.

First of all, we need to revive and reinvent the public sphere. If we want to lower our emissions, we need subways, streetcars and clean-rail systems that are not only everywhere but affordable to everyone.

We need energy-efficient affordable housing along those transit lines. We need smart electrical grids carrying renewable energy. We need garbage collection that has, as its goal, the elimination of garbage.

And we don’t just need new infrastructure. We need major investments in the old infrastructure to cope with the coming storms. For decades we have fought against the steady starving of the public sphere.

Again and again we’ve seen how those decades of cuts have left us more vulnerable to climate disasters: superstorms bursting through decaying levees, heavy rain washing sewage into lakes, wildfires raging as fire crews are underpaid and understaffed. Bridges and tunnels buckling under the new reality of heavy weather.

Far from taking us away from the fight for a robust public sphere, climate change puts us right in the middle of it --  but this time armed with arguments that raise the stakes significantly. It is not hyperbole to say that our future depends on our ability to do what we have so long been told we can no longer do: act collectively. And who better than unions to carry that message?

The renewal of the public sphere will create millions of new, high paying union jobs – jobs in fields that don’t hasten the warming of the planet.

But it’s not just boilermakers, pipefitters, construction workers and assembly line workers who get new jobs and purpose in this great transition.

There are big parts of our economy that are already low-carbon.

They’re the parts facing the most disrespect, demeaning attacks and cuts. They happen to be jobs dominated by women, new Canadians, and people of colour.

And they’re also the sectors we need to expand massively: the care-givers, educators, sanitation workers, and other service sector workers. The very ones that your new union has pledged to organize. The low-carbon workers who are already here, demanding living wages and respect. Turning low-paying low-carbon jobs into higher-paying jobs is itself a climate solution and should be recognized as such.

Here I think we should take inspiration from the fast-food workers in the United States and their historic strikes this past week. They are showing how this organizing can be done. Maybe it will turn out to be the first uprising in a sustained rebellion fighting for both real wages and real food!  One in which the health of the workers and the health of society are inextricably linked.

It should be clear by now that I am not suggesting some half-assed token “green jobs” program. This is a green labour revolution I’m talking about. An epic vision of healing our country from the ravages of the last 30 years of neoliberalism and healing the planet in the process.

Environmentalists can’t lead that kind of revolution on their own. No political party is rising to the challenge. We need you to lead.

How to Pay For It

So the big question is: how are we going to pay for all this?

I mean, we’re broke, right? Or so our government is always telling us.

But with stakes this high, crying broke isn’t going to cut it. We know that it’s always possible to find money to bail out banks and start new wars. So that means we have to go to where the money is, and the money is with the fossil fuel companies and the banks that finance them. We have to get our hands on some of their super profits to help clean up the mess they made. It’s a simple concept, well established in law: the polluter pays.

We know we can’t get the money by continuing to extract more. So as we wind down our dependence on fossil fuels, as we extract LESS, we have to keep MORE of the profits.

There’s lots of ways to do that. A national carbon tax and higher royalties are the most obvious. A financial transaction tax would be a big help. Raising corporate taxes across the board would too.

When you do that, suddenly, digging holes and laying pipe isn’t the only option on the table.

Quick example. A recent study from the CCPA compared the public value from a five billion dollar pipeline – Enbridge Gateway for instance – and the value from the same amount of money invested in green economic development.

Spend that money on a pipeline, you get mostly short-term construction jobs, big private sector profits, and heavy public costs for future environmental damage.

Spend that money on public transit, building retrofits and renewable energy, and you get, at the very least, three times as many jobs…not to mention a safer future. The actual number of jobs could be many times more than that, according to their modeling. At the highest end, green investment could create 34 times more jobs than just building another pipeline.

And how do you raise five billion dollars for public investments like that? A minimal national carbon tax of ten dollars a tonne would do the trick. And there would be five billion new dollars every year. Unlike the one-off Enbridge put on the table.

Environmentalists, and I include myself here, have to do a much better job of not just saying no to projects like Northern Gateway but also forcefully saying yes to our solutions about how to build and finance green infrastructure.

Now: these alternatives makes perfect sense on paper, but in the real world, they slam headlong into the dominant ideology that tells us that we can’t increase taxes on corporations, that we can’t say no to new investment, and moreover, that we can’t actively decide what kind of economy we want – that we are supposed to leaving it all to the magic of the market.

Well – we’ve seen how the private sector manages this crisis. It’s time to get back in there. This transition needs to be publicly managed. And that will mean everything from new crown corporations in energy, to a huge re-distribution of power, infrastructure and investment.

A democratically-controlled, de-centralized energy system operated in the public interest. This agenda is increasingly being described as “energy democracy” and it’s not a new idea in the union world – Sean Sweeney of the Global Labor Institute at Cornell University is here today, and many fine trade unions – including CEP - have been working on this agenda for years. It’s time to turn energy democracy into a reality here in Canada. “Power to the people” is a terrific slogan to start with.

As you all know, there have been some modest attempts by provincial governments to play a more activist role in bringing about a green transition, while resisting the pressure to double down on dirty energy.

But in those cases, we’re starting to see something very disturbing. In the provinces where governments have taken the most positive, bold action, they’re getting dragged into trade court.

And that brings me to the last piece of a real progressive climate agenda.

Trade

It’s time to rip up so-called Free Trade deals once and for all. And we sure as hell can’t be signing new ones.

You’ve fought them for decades now, since the CAW played such a pivotal role in the battle against the first Free Trade deal with the US. You’ve fought them because they undermine workers rights both here and abroad, because they drive a race to the bottom, because they hyper-empower corporations.

And you were right – even more right than you knew. Because not only is corporate globalization largely responsible for soaring emissions, but now the logic of free trade is directly blocking us from making the specific changes needed to reduce climate chaos in response.

A couple of quick examples.

Ontario’s Green Energy plan is far from perfect. But it has a very sensible “buy local” provision so that wind and solar projects in Ontario actually deliver jobs and economic benefits to local communities.  It’s the core principle of a just transition.

Well, the World Trade Organization has decided that this measure is illegal.

The CAW is already in a coalition fighting back – but more green policies will face the same corporate challenges.

Here’s another example. Quebec banned fracking – a courageous move that has been taken up by two consecutive governments.

But a US drilling company is planning to sue Canada for $250- million dollars under NAFTA’s Chapter 11, claiming the ban interferes with its “valuable right to mine for oil and gas under the St. Lawrence river.”

We should have seen this coming. A WTO official was quoted almost a decade ago, saying that the WTO enables challenges against “almost any measure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

In other words, these maniacs think trade should trump everything, including the planet itself. If there has ever been an argument to stop this madness, climate change is it.

The battle lines have never been clearer. Climate change is the argument that must trump all others in the battle against corporate free trade. I mean, sorry guys, but the health of our communities and our planet is just a little more important than your god-given right to obscene profits.

These are moral arguments we can win.

And we don’t have to wait for governments to give us permission. Next time they close a factory making fossil-fuel machinery – whether cars, tractors, or airplanes – don’t let them do it.

Do what workers are doing from Argentina to Greece to Chicago: occupy the factory. Turn it into a green worker co-op. Go beyond negotiating a last, sad severance. Demand the resources – from companies and governments – to start building the new economy right now.

Whether that’s electric trains or windmills. Watch that factory turn into a beacon for students, anti-poverty activists, environmentalists, First Nations. All fighting together for that vision.

Climate change is a tool. Pick it up and use it. Use it to demand the supposedly impossible.

It’s not a threat to your jobs, it's the key to liberation from a logic that is already waging a war on the entire concept of dignified work.

So all we need is the political power to make this vision a reality. And that power can be built on the urgency and science of the climate crisis.

If we stay true to a clear vision that these changes are what is required to stave off an ecological collapse, then we will change the conversation.

We’ll escape from the clutches of narrow free-market economics, where we are constantly told to ask for less and expect less and we will find ourselves in a conversation about morality – about what kind of people we want to be, about what kind of world we want for ourselves and our kids.

If we set the terms of that conversation, we back Stephen Harper up against the wall.

We finally hold him accountable for the lethal ideology he serves – the one that he has been hiding behind that bland and boring mask of his.

That’s how you shift the balance of forces in this country.

If UNIFOR becomes the voice for a boldly different economic model, one that provides solutions to the attacks on working people, on poor people, and the attacks on the Earth itself, then you can stop worrying about your continued relevance.

You will be on the front lines of the fight for the future, and everyone else – including the opposition parties – will have to follow or be left behind.

First Nations

I believe that a key to this shift is deepening your alliance with First Nations, whose constitutionally guaranteed title to land and resources is the biggest legal barrier Harper faces to his vision of Canada as an extraction and export machine – a country-sized sacrifice zone.

As my friend Clayton Thomas Mueller says, imagine if the workers and First Nations actually joined forces in a meaningful coalition – the rightful owners of the land, side by side with the people working the mines and pipelines, coming together to demand another economic model?

People and the earth itself on one side, predatory capitalism on the other.

The Harper Tories wouldn’t know what hit them.

But this is about more than strategic alliances. As we tell our own story of a different Canada to stand up to Harper’s story about endless extraction, we will need to learn from the Indigenous worldview. The one that understands that you can’t just take and take, but also care-take, and give back whenever you harvest. That five-year-plans are for kids, and grownups think about seven generations. A worldview that reminds us that there are always unforeseen consequences because everything is connected.

Because building the kinds of deep coalitions that we need begins with identifying the threads that connect all of our struggles. And indeed that recognize they are the SAME struggle.

I want to leave you with a word that might help. Overburden.

Overburden

When I was in the tar sands earlier this summer, I kept thinking about it. Overburden is the word used by mining companies to describe the “waste earth covering a mineral deposit.”

But mining companies have a strange definition of waste. It includes forests, fertile soil, rocks, clay – basically anything that stands between them and the gold, copper, or bitumen they are after.

Overburden is the life that gets in the way of money. Life treated as garbage.

As we passed pile after pile of masticated earth by the side of the road, it occurred to me that it wasn’t just the dense and beautiful Boreal forest that was “overburden” to these companies.

We are all overburden. That’s certainly the way the Harper government sees us.

• Unions are overburden since the rights you have won are a barrier to unfettered greed.
• Environmentalists are overburden, because they are always going on about climate change and oil spills.
• Indigenous people are overburden, since their rights and court challenges get in the way.
• Scientists are overburden, since their research proves what I’ve been telling you.
• Democracy itself is overburden to our government – whether it’s the right of citizens to participate in an environmental assessment hearing, or the right of Parliament to meet and debate the future of the country.

This is the world deregulated capitalism has created, one in which anyone and anything can find themselves discarded, chewed up, tossed on the slag heap.

But “overburden” has another meaning. It also means, simply, “to load with too great a burden”; to push something or someone beyond their limits.

And that’s a very good description of what we’re experiencing too.

Our crumbling infrastructure is overburdened by new demands and old neglect.

Our workers are overburdened by employers who treat their bodies like machines.

Our streets and shelters are overburdened by those whose labour has been deemed disposable.

The atmosphere is overburdened with the gasses we are spewing into it.

And it is in this context that we are hearing shouts of “enough!” from all quarters. This much and NO further.

We heard it from the fast food worker in Milwaukee, who went on strike this week holding a sign saying, “I am worth more” and helped set off a national debate about inequality.

We heard it from the Quebec Students last summer, who said “No” to a tuition increase and ended up unseating a government and sparking a national debate about the right to free education.

We heard it from the four women who said “No” to Harper’s attacks on environmental protections and indigenous rights, pledging to be Idle No More, and ended up setting off an indigenous rights uprising across North America.

And we are hearing “Enough” from the planet itself as it fights back in the only ways it can.

Everywhere, life is reasserting itself. Insisting that it is not overburden.

We are starting to realize that not only have we had enough – but that there is enough.

To quote Evo Morales, there is enough for all of us to live well. There just isn’t enough for some of us to live better and better.

To close off, I want to read an excerpt from Article 2 of your brand new constitution.

Words that many of us have been waiting a very long time to hear. Words that you may have already heard today, but they bear repeating.  Here goes…

Our goal is transformative. To reassert common interest over private interest.

Our goal is to change our workplaces and our world. Our vision is compelling.

It is to fundamentally change the economy, with equality and social justice, restore and strengthen our democracy and achieve an environmentally sustainable future.

This is the basis of social unionism -- a strong and progressive union culture and a commitment to work in common cause with other progressives in Canada and around the world.

Brothers and Sisters, all I would add is: don’t say it if you don’t mean it.

Because we really, really need you to mean it.

Thank you.

This story first appeared on the Climate Psychologist. 

Our society is living within a massive lie. The lie says, “Everything is fine and we should proceed with business as usual. We are not destroying our climate and, with it, our stability and our civilization. We are not committing passive suicide.”

The lie says we are fine—that climate change isn’t real, or is uncertain, or is far away, or won’t be bad enough to threaten humanity. The lie says that small changes will solve the problem. That recycling, bicycling, or closing the Keystone Pipeline will solve the problem. The lie allows people to put climate change in the back of their minds. To view it as someone else’s issue—the domain of scientists or activists. The lie allows us to focus on other things. To proceed with business as usual. To be calm and complacent while our planet burns.

And what is the truth? I will not go into the specifics, or the science, of what is happening to our planet or how it threatens to throw civilization into chaos.  For a thorough discussion, I will refer you to: The IPCC’ 4th report,Paul Gilding’s “The Great Disruption,” Bill McKibben’s, “Eaarth” and James Hansen’s “Storms of my Grandchildren.”

James Hansen, recently left his long career as a NASA scientist so that he could more effectively live in climate truth. He is now by pursuing full-time climate change advocacy. Here is how he describes the scope of the problem:

Planet Earth, creation, the world in which civilization developed, the world with climate patterns that we know and stable shorelines, is in imminent peril. The urgency of the situation crystallized only in the past few years… The startling conclusion is that continued exploitation of all fossil fuels on Earth threatens not only the other millions of species on the planet, but also the survival of humanity itself—and the timetable is shorter than we thought.

I wish to emphasize two issues that are often misunderstood.  First: the time line. Many refer to climate change as a problem for our grandchildren—as occurring sometime in the future. But climate change is happening right now. Storms have been becoming more  extreme. Droughts are damaging crop yields, and contributing to civil wars, especially in Africa and in the Middle East. Fish and birds are migrating north. Humans are starting to follow. These problems will get worse and worse. They will combine with each other, to create large-scale disruptions, disruptions that could overwhelm us, causing the breakdown of the social order and the rule of law. These catastrophic scenarios are decades, not centuries, away.

The other issue is uncertainty and how we should incorporate it into our thinking and plans. Our climate and ecosystems are dynamic, non-linear systems. It is therefore hard to predict precisely what will happen and when as the Earth’s climate changes. Scientists don’t have a test case from which to derive predictions. We are the test case.

Shall we make “Scientists don’t know everything! They aren’t sure!” our anthem and take this uncertainty as license to continue business as usual? No. Actually, the opposite. We know that carbon and greenhouse gasses will cause catastrophic impacts for humanity, but we don’t precisely how and when—they will unfold. This uncertainty must therefore reinforce our urgency to make major, systemic changes as rapidly as possible.   By delaying action, we are playing round after round of Russian Roulette. Instead of recognizing the gruesome danger and inevitable outcome, we comfort ourselves with the fact that the bullet might not be in the chamber this time.

The lie says that there is no crisis. That business as usual is fine. That our species is not marching towards its doom. The lie is our enemy, and our survival depends on fighting it. But knowing the truth isn’t enough. To beat the lie, we have to do more than know the truth. We have to live the truth. We have to act on what we know to be true. We must spread our truth to our friends, family, community, and networks. By openly discussing climate change whenever it is relevant (and it is relevant to most things). We must confront the lie wherever we see it. We must honor our truth by becoming politically and socially engaged.  We must organize ourselves, to fight first the lie, than the forces that threaten our climate.

By living in climate truth, we dismantle the lie. Once the lie is exposed, the severity and immediacy of the climate crisis will be broadly accepted.  As people throughout all segments and levels of society wake up to the truth, we will gain political and social power. We will embark on a coordinated crisis response to climate change. We will act with the precision, dedication, and resolve. We will mobilize society like our country last did during WWII, when we transformed ourselves in order to win the war.  There will be exhausting work. There will be shared sacrifice. And there will be losses. But if we, together, live in climate truth and fight back, than humanity will prevail.

Vaclav Havel and Living in Truth

In his 1978 essay, the Czeck political writer Vaclav Havel argued that Czechs were largely cynical about the State, but hid their feelings and acted compliant, in order to avoid trouble. Havel wrote that much more important than what you believed about the State and its ideology was how you lived. By living “within the lie” of the State—by displaying communist propaganda, voting in phony elections, and not speaking your real opinions—people supported the lie and maintained the system, even if they privately believed the state was corrupt. One persons’ living within the lie put pressure on their families and neighbors to do the same. Havel introduced the concept of resisting the states’ lies through “Living in truth,” meaning refusing to take part in rituals or displays that one did not believe in, that one should speak one’s mind and pursue one’s goals and activities with the truth in mind, whether the State will approve or not.

Havel saw that living in truth offered the possibility for a rapid change in society—that a revolution could occur simultaneously in many sectors of society. As he put it:

(The power of living in truth) does not reside in the strength of definable political or social groups, but chiefly in a potential, which is hidden throughout the whole of society, including the official power structures of that society. Therefore this power does not rely on soldiers of its own, but on soldiers of the enemy as it were—that is to say, on everyone who is living within the lie and who may be struck at any moment (in theory, at least) by the force of truth (or who, out of an instinctive desire to protect their position, may at least adapt to that force). It is a bacteriological weapon, so to speak, utilized when conditions are ripe by a single civilian to disarm an entire division…. This, too, is why the regime prosecutes, almost as a reflex action, preventatively, even modest attempts to live in truth (p.23).

In 1989, Czechoslovakia had a non-violent revolution—“the Velvet Revolution”— in which massive protests and general strikes caused the Communist government to relinquish its power. During this peaceful transition of power from totalitarianism to democracy, Havel became the first elected President of Czechoslovakia. Enough people were living in truth, the lie could no longer breathe. Havel was right—when people stopped living within the lie, the lie simply collapsed.

The Climate Lie

The United States in 2013 may seem nothing like the Soviet Bloc in 1978. In some ways, the situations are very different. But the crucial commonality is that both systems are built on lies, and are sustained by people living within the lies.

Havel described the lies of the totalitarian government:

Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.  (15)

Because Americans do not live in a totalitarian system, our lie is a lie co-created by the government, corporations, the media, and the people.  These organizations encourage the lie, but it only exists because we, the people accept it and choose to live within it.  The lie exists in different forms in different segments of society.   But the basic lie is “We should continue with business as usual, for everything is fine. There is no impending climate collapse. There is no need for a massive social-political movement. There is nothing I can do; climate change doesn’t concern me.”

The lie itself is different in content, but it operates in the same ways as the Communist totalitarian lie–through conformity and collectively reinforcing the lie. As Havel describes:

Individuals need not believe all these mystifications but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to accept their life with it and in it. For by this very fact individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, and are the system. (15)

Most Americans are aware that climate change is a near-term threat to humanity. But what they believe doesn’t matter. How they live matters.  By proceeding with business as usual, by living and working within the current system rather than fighting for a major social and political change—they live within the lie, prop up the lie, and maintain the collision course we are on.

There are three  major ways that the Climate Lie operates: Intellectual denial, emotional denial, and environmental tokenism.

Intellectual Denial

When people reference “Climate Change Denial” they are referring to intellectual denial. People who refuse to believe that climate change is really happening, or really caused by humans, or so forth.

Some people don’t believe in climate change at all. They think that scientists are lying, or wrong, or unsure about whether carbon dioxide emissions are heating the climate, causing extreme weather, and setting us on a path to disaster. Other people believe climate change is happening, but too slowly to matter. That climate change is a problem for “our grandchildren” but not for us.

Naomi Oreskes has analyzed the way that the oil industry utilized corrupt and ideologically blinded scientists to sow and nurture this doubt in the American people. There has been a multi-million dollar attempt on the part of oil companies and investors, such as the Koch brothers, to assault Americans’ confidence to know about climate change.

Another culprit is the media. The American media, shaped by the two-party system, is enamored with idea that every issue has two sides, which should be given equal time, attention and respect. Climate change is continually discussed as a debated issue, not a scientific fact with terrifying implications. Further, the media propagates the climate lie by not discussing it when clearly relevant—such as when discussing extreme weather, increasingly hostile agricultural conditions, invasive species, water scarcities and droughts, with no mention of climate change. The news media, including the venerated New York Times has been cowed by the zealous lies of climate change deniers and are afraid to speak the truth.

Finally, there is postmodernism, or the intellectual fad, which denies that objective truth can exist, because everything is relative, and everyone is biased by their own perspective and agenda.  Though this way of thinking can be extremely interesting, it is putting us in danger.

All humans have the ability to KNOW that climate change is happening, today. You don’t have to be a scientist, or a philosopher. All you need is a discerning mind that says:

There is a scientific consensus that says human emissions are warming the climate, and that that means hotter temperatures, more extreme weather, floods, and droughts.  That all squares with what I see happening, out my window and across the country and the world. I know the truth when I see it. Climate change is happening and we need to fight back.

Emotional denial

Most people who “believe” in climate change do not “feel” the affects, emotionally, of what they know. They deny their own emotional response. They do not feel terror, anger, grief, or guilt. They do not feel the pull to organize with their fellow humans and fight back against climate change.

Much of this emotional denial is borne from feelings of helplessness. People feel that there is nothing they can do. That the war is already lost.  Maybe they could do something if they were in Congress or a scientist, but they are just a normal person, a  citizen—climate change is out of their purview.  The reality of climate change is too overwhelming, so they deaden themselves to their feelings.

Cynicism is a common expression of emotional denial. Many of the well-heeled, erudite, people whom I speak with about climate change tell me that “we are fucked.” Cynicism pairs intellectual belief with emotional denial and renunciation of personal responsibility and the social contract. Rather than work together to solve our shared problem, cynics declare climate change hopeless, a foregone conclusion.

Cynics blame those who are in intellectual denial. They ask, “How can we solve climate change when half the country doesn’t even believe in it?” By drawing the division line between those who intellectually believe and those who intellectually deny, he absolves himself of the responsibility to live in truth. All he must do is carry the truth in his mind, and he feels on the right side of the debate, the right side of history. He fails to see how his emotional denial, his living within the lie, entrenches the status quo.

There is a strand of emotional denial that acknowledges that climate change is happening—that severe weather is becoming more and more dangerous and damaging, but that this is happening because it heralds the second coming of Jesus Christ.  This is a particularly disturbing element of the Climate Lie, as those who believe it are stating their intention to watch the unraveling of the climate and humanity with passivity and anticipation

Those who believe that climate change signals the End Times, and therefore oppose action to stop it, have the minimum obligation to be very clear about their opinions and the reasoning behind them. This will at least allow an open dialogue, and give non-religious people to say: “Wow, that’s a pretty big bet you are making. You are certain enough that you understand God’s will perfectly, that you are willing to risk the safety and prosperity of my family, country, and species.” By proceeding with business as usual, and failing to make beliefs about climate change and the End Times explicit, these believers entrench the climate lie.

Tokenism

Environmental tokenism plays a major role in maintaining the Climate Lie. Tokenism asks that you reduce your carbon footprint, recycle, bike, and turn off the lights when you leave a room. This is the dominant discourse on climate change. When people think: “God, climate change is terrifying! What should I do to stop it?” the answer they usually find or is supplied for them is to reduce their individual emissions.

This approach is a-political, even anti-political. The “solution” takes place individually, in private. It is not organized and shared. It does not challenge existing power structures.

Further, it belies a fundamental misunderstanding of human civilization. We are not merely a collection of individuals. No man is an island; we live in a web of complex systems, which are bigger than us. No one of us created this mess, and no one of us can end it. Individual consumption decisions can never create a carbon tax, they can’t build public transit systems, and they can’t make a city more resilient to hurricanes. Voluntary individual actions can’t do much, really, they are a drop in the bucket.

And that is why individual attempts to reduce consumption are tokenism. They substitute insignificant action for significant action. They give the feeling of making a difference without really making one. They serve as an act of symbolic cleansing. Letting us say, “I have done my part. My hands are clean.” These actions serve a magical function, psychologically, like a lucky rabbits foot. If we perform this ritual (recycling, turning down the AC, etc), if we make these sacrifices, maybe we will  somehow avert ecological catastrophe. But Environmental tokenism will not save us. It is the wrong scale. Environmental tokenism tells us that what is happening to the climate is a private matter rather than a political, social one.

Some defend tokenism with the idea, “every little bit helps!” There is some truth in that argument. Perhaps all the conscientious people, acting individually to reduce their consumption, have slowed the process of climate change. Maybe, if not for all of the environmentally conscientious decisions people have made, we would be in even worse ecological straits that we currently are. So there is, theoretically, a benefit to individual reductions in consumption.  But this benefit will, at best slightly slow our march towards collapse.

Another argument in the defense of individual token consumption and lifestyle choices is that they lay the ground for political action; they raise awareness of climate change and get people thinking about change. This may be true, at least for some people. As such, we much strive to turn the quasi-political into the fully political, personal lifestyle choices into mass political demands.

When humans make major changes in how they function, such as the changes we must make now, if we want to continue our civilization with some level of homeostasis instead of chaos—we do it together.  We are a social species—genetically programmed to interact with each other, to work together, to form bonds. Evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson has recently written about how humanity’s success and power has come from this social mentality. It is what has allowed us to learn from each other, to coordinate our intentions, and to conquer the earth together.

It is because of our innate, social nature that “individual actions” will never be able to stop the ecological crisis. To truly mobilize the power of humanity, we need a social and political movement. We need to realign the stars, together.

Environmental tokenism encourages us to live within the lie. It assigns responding to the ecological collapse to the individual realm, thus allowing public business to continue as usual.

How to Live in Climate Truth Intellectually, Emotionally, and Socially

I have offered an outline of the Climate Lie, how it functions, and how almost all of us are living within it, committing passive suicide, and sleepwalking towards destruction.

Now, I will describe how to live in climate truth. How to wake up, feel terrified, and ignite a social and political movement to protect yourself and everything you know and love.

The first step to living in truth is acknowledging the truth of climate change intellectually, emotionally, socially, and politically.

Acknowledging the truth of climate change will likely require educating yourself further on the problem. When is the last time you read a book or article about climate change? Many young adults were educated about Global Warming in school or college, but have not kept current with the (ever-worsening) state of the threat. Living in truth means continually updating and improving one’s understanding of what is happening to our climate. One particularly effective method of living in Climate Truth is joining or creating a climate-change book group. These groups create an organized structure in which to learn and talk about the frightening truths of climate change. This is difficult material, reading together allows people to help each other cope with it.

Reading and learning can show you the intellectual truth of climate change, but living that truth emotionally, making it personal, takes true courage. To look unflinchingly at a terrifying reality can humble even the most avid truth-seeker.  It means rethinking your life plans in the light of the reality of climate change. Do you really want to move across the country from your family, when travel will likely become increasingly expensive and difficult? Are you sure you want to have children? No one can answer these questions for you except you. But living in Climate truth means recognizing that climate change will affect you and your family. It is not a choice—to be involved in climate change or not. You are involved. No one is outside of the ecosystem. And living in truth means recognizing the myriad, cascading implications of that.

Living in Climate Truth comes with a sense of urgency. A motivating fear. It makes people aware that they have both a moral and a strategic obligation to act. The moral obligation comes from their sense of love and respect for humanity. The desire to save their human brothers and sisters from floods, droughts, severe weather, vector born disease and civil unrest.

Socially, living in climate truth will look somewhat different for different people. Everyone must do what they can. Artists make art about climate change, Journalists report on it, teachers share the frightening, but crucial information with their students.  Each person must ask himself or herself, “What can I contribute to the social/political movement that will stop this catastrophe? What are my skills, talents, resources, and networks? Who can I talk to about the climate change? Whose mind can I change?”

Living in Climate Truth means the impending catastrophe of climate change must never be avoided as a topic of discussion. Perhaps even more difficult, one cannot maintain a “private” opinion about climate change (it is an imminent threat to security and safety), and a “public” opinion (scientists are still debating the severity). This means, if scientists are buying houses on higher ground, they have a duty to make clear to the public why they are making those decisions. There must be no “private” opinions and discussions on the climate change catastrophe, because the collapse of our climate is inherently a public matter. Every human has a right to the full truth—living together in truth is our only chance for salvation.

You must talk about climate change with you friends, family, colleagues, and neighbors even though this is often uncomfortable. A neighbor comments, “Another storm? This weather is just crazy.”  You have a choice, in your answer, to either support the lie or the truth. If you answer, “Yea, it’s nuts!” You are holding up the lie, helping your neighbor, and the larger cultural group, cling to denial and false hope.  However if your answer includes the information that climate change is responsible for the increase in severe weather, that it is only going to get worse until we fight back, that this is deeply terrifying, and you invite your neighbor to your next political meeting, then you have struck a blow for truth.

What if every time someone on Facebook commented about how weird the weather has been, one of their friends pointed out that this was being driven by climate change, and suggested things for them to read, or organizations for them to check out? Can you imagine how quickly the collective mood could turn?

Those who propagate the Climate Lie—the government, the media, and corporations, particularly oil companies— need to be held accountable. The New York Times, CNN, and Weather.com, as well as all major news outlets that I know of, frequently publish stories on unfolding severe weather, and phenomena highly related to climate change, and shamefully omit a discussion of climate change overall. What if every time this happened, the author, editor, and publishers received a torrent of angry e-mails and tweets?

Every time we confront the lie, and those who promote it, we strike a blow for climate truth, and move towards a warlike response.

How to Live in Climate Truth, Politically

People living and spreading climate truth will create a cultural shift, creating a social climate in which huge political changes are possible. But those political changes don’t happen on their own. We have to demand them. Any governments’ most fundamental responsibility is keeping its citizens safe. By sitting idly by as our climate collapses, our government is proving itself near useless. We, the people, need to organize and re-claim our fallen democracy, and fight for our Nation and civilization.

Perhaps the most important question every person must ask and answer in order to live in Climate Truth is, “With whom will I align myself?” “What group will I join?” These are the questions one must ask in times of global crisis. When you realize how small you are in the face of the problem, you realize that anything you undertake as an individual could possibly protect you. Jack Shepherd put it beautifully. After the crash of flight 815 left a group of survivors marooned on a mysterious island, he told the group, “Live together, die alone.” With whom shall you cast your lot?

I have two suggestions to use when you make this most important of choices—the choice of your political/organizational alignment. First, that you choose an organization firmly committed to Climate Truth. Any organization that has its “internal” understanding of the scope of the threat but minimizes this to the public because they “can’t handle the truth” is not committed to truth. Choose an organization that speaks the truth, even when that is difficult and uncomfortable; choose an organization that has the courage of its convictions.

Secondly, be sure that your organization has a comprehensive plan and vision for victory. The scale of climate change is so large. There are so many mountains to climb if we will stop it. But setting a goal of anything else than solving climate change is planning for failure. Even worse, if an organization sets “reasonable,” small and medium-scale goals, then this organization is encouraging tokenism, business-as-usual, and thus living within the Lie. Choose an organization that recognizes the massive scale of the threat and responds with a massive-scale advocacy.

At the moment, I am not sure any group exists that fulfills both of these precepts. But that can change; advocacy organizations can change their culture and planning, and new groups can form. The best existing advocacy group, in my knowledge, 350 is an organization that lives in truth, but they lack a comprehensive plan for victory—focusing on relatively small goals, such as stopping the Keystone Pipeline. Hopefully, 350 will adopt a plan that begins today and ends with a planet that is safe for humanity. Join a group and advocate for it to live in truth and provide a comprehensive plan. Or start a new group. But find your place in the incipient social and political movement. Know that without it, we are surely lost.

Living in Climate Truth means Living with Honor

Living in climate truth can be extremely challenging. It can set you apart from your peers, people can have a “shoot the messenger” mentality, and criticize you for your views or your advocacy.

The truth of climate change is frightening, even overwhelming. We would rather forget it and enjoy the present.

But living in climate truth comes with honor, dignity, and a sense of purpose. Living within the lie means being self-deceiving, failing your responsibility to your brothers and sisters, and ultimately, being a passive victim of forces outside of your control. It means holding your head high, even as circumstances seem insurmountable.

Living in truth means refusing to be lied to and manipulated. Knowing that you are part of the solution, rather than part of the problem. Knowing that, if civilization does fall, you will be able to say, “I did my best.”  Knowing that, if we succeed, you will be able to live the rest of your life with pride. When your species, your civilization, your planet was on the line, you faced the terrifying unknown with courage, dedication and resolve. You lived in truth.

After 40 years of what felt like progress in protecting our environment, the ecological crisis now seems to be worsening. Climate change, caused by greenhouse gas emissions, is heating up. The massive exploitation of the tar sands in Canada might be the tipping point, from which we can never return. Fracking for natural gas and oil threatens underground water supplies. The oceans are being massively overfished. Species extinction is accelerating.

The global commons faces massive threats no one could have dreamed on the first Earth Day back in 1970. What are we to do?

Obviously we need to address these mounting global crises—vocally and determinedly over the long term. But it’s also time to take a look around our own communities.

While we generally think of Greens rallying to save rainforests, coral reefs, deserts and other faraway tracts of wilderness, that’s just one aspect of saving the Earth. It’s also crucial to work together with neighbors on important projects in our own backyard. Activism at this level draws more people into fighting for the environment because they can see the consequences in their own lives—and they will then make connections to what’s happening elsewhere around the world. Plus, a few victories on the local level will give them momentum to dig in for long run on the international level.

That’s why we must enlarge our definition of the environment to include the places that we all call home—where we live and work and play. Indeed, this kind of environmentalism would ultimately preserve wild places as well as human communities since brightening life in their neighborhoods means that people will feel less urge to move on to new homes in sprawling subdivisions carved out of forest, marsh, desert or farmland, which can be reached only by pollution-spewing vehicles.

This would nurture a new breed of environmental activists working to make streets safe from traffic so our children can walk to school as well as challenging companies that expand humanity’s carbon footprint. They would lobby for brightening neighborhood parks at the same time as stopping rainforest destruction. They would transform outdated shopping malls into neighborhood centers complete with housing, public squares, libraries and convenient transit stops along with pressuring government and business to invest more in renewable energy and high-speed rail.

Jonathan Porritt, a leading UK Green, declares “Most people think the environment is everything that happens outside our lives. Yet this is a huge philosophical error creating a false divide between us and the physical world. We need to.. acknowledge that the environment is rooted in our sense of place: our homes, our streets, our neighborhoods, our communities.”

A great opportunity now exists for the environmental movement to reinvigorate itself by expanding the scope of places it is willing to fight for. This broader vision of the environment would encompass rural watersheds and town squares, coastal wetlands and neighborhood playgrounds. It’s a winning strategy to revive the movement and restore our planet. Let’s bring the environmental movement back home to inner cities and small towns and suburban neighborhoods. Greens need all the help we can at this pivotal moment in history.

Some of the material here first appeared in the  Great Neighborhood Book: A D-I-Y Guide to Placemaking written in collaboration with  Project for Public Spaces  and published by New Society Publishers.

This story is the second in a two-part series. You can read the first part, "Why We Can't Fight Climate Change Using Tactics From the Civil Rights Movement," here.

I have previously delineated the ways in which the Human Climate Movement shares goals with the Civil Rights Movement, but differs in the barriers to those goals, and in the technological context. I argue that both movements must 1) empower their membership, 2) place the truth front and center, forcing Americans out of denial and destroying the illusion of neutrality and 3) create massive social and political pressure, especially among elites and policy makers, for change. I showed that the movements are distinct, however: the fundamental barrier to the goals of the Civil Rights Movement was racism, while the fundamental barrier to the Human Climate Movement is anxiety. Civil disobedience fought racism but does not fight anxiety. Anxiety is best contained through the existence of a comprehensive plan that starts right now and leads to victory and through human relationships. 

To effectively contain anxiety, a plan must be believable and comprehensive. It must lead from right now to victory. In the case of climate change, this means that it must have two distinct parts: 1) A plan to ignite a social and political movement powerful enough to fundamentally change the national approach to climate change and 2) A plan for how to actually fight climate change, once the social movement has succeeded in creating the social and political will necessary to impel legislative action.

Many social movements, including the Civil Rights Movement, move forward step-by-step, gaining momentum from every small victory. They do not have a comprehensive plan at the beginning, but rather plan as they go. The Human Climate Movement is attempting this currently—hoping that victories such as university divestment or stopping the Keystone XL pipeline will lead to a larger movement and ever-larger victories. The problem with this stepwise approach is that it doesn’t contain anxiety. It doesn’t offer a path to victory—to a planet safe for humanity. This means that, while building gradually has worked for other social movements, the Human Climate Movement must start with an all-encompassing plan for success.

Luckily, we can put together a plan to fight climate change once we recognize the depths of the crisis and muster the social and political will to fight back. A good model that we can pull from is Paul Gilding and Jorgen Randers, "One Degree War Plan," which approaches fighting climate change with the same zeal and urgency of purpose that the Allies fought WWII.It is a plan to prevent further emissions as much as possible and remove greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere, while also pursuing adaptation measures and low-risk, reversible geoengineering strategies. Their plan cuts emissions by 50% in the first 5 years, and to become entirely carbon neutral in 20 years. The next 80 years will be dedicated to recovering from the damage that has already been locked into the system. Their aggressive approach includes, during the first 5 years of the war:  closing 1,000 coal plants, building wind farms and solar arrays in order to compensate for some of the lost energy and encouraging efficiency measures and electricity rationing for the rest of the energy losses; decreasing commercial flights by 10% a year; cutting deforestation by 50%; utilizing agricultural and forestry methods that bind 1 gigaton of carbon into the soil; and instituting a carbon tax of $20 a tonne, which increases by $20 a year until it reaches $100 per tonne of carbon. The entire plan is available here.

Gilding and Randers prepared their plan as an example of what could be accomplished with a war approach, the details were meant to be flexible, and should change according to cutting edge scientific understanding, technological breakthroughs, and new ideas. I, for example, would advocate for the creation of a “Climate Corps” in which young people were drafted out of high school for 2 years of public service, fighting climate change. We could put the Climate Core to work on projects such as insulating homes, building sea walls and levies, and spreading agricultural techniques that bind carbon in the soil.

Though the details must continue to evolve, the point of the Gilding & Randers plan is that: if the United States came out of denial and waged a WWII-level war on climate change, civilization would have a good chance, a fighting chance, of continuation. We would need allies, of course, just like in any war. It wouldn’t be easy, or simple, or short. But it would be humanity's chance to be active participants in our destiny, rather than sitting, passive victims, waiting for climate change to wreak its havoc. Thus, a WWII approach should be the plan with which the Human Climate Movement fights for.

But how do we get there? How can we possibly muster the political will to start fighting? Gilding believes that, once climate change gets bad enough, humanity will realize that we have to fight back. It will be a spontaneous, global awakening.

I disagree. Denial is an incredibly strong force. When animals, including humans are in existential danger they generally do one of three things: fight, flight, or freeze (Schmitt et al., 2008).  They play dead and hope the danger passes them by. As a species, we are paralyzed by fear and disbelief (Hamilton 2010). As climate change worsens, we very well could become more frozen and more deeply in denial.  To switch gears into fight-for-our-life mode, we need a social movement. We need the Human Climate Movement to focus national attention, to fight denial, spread the truth, and usher in that awakening. And to do that, it needs a new strategy; one that is built around the goal of containing anxiety and that is responsive to our current technological situation.

A Person-to-Person, Pledge Based Approach

Imagine: Your phone rings. It’s your old friend. (Or your cousin, neighbor, or former roommate). He says he would like to talk with you about climate change. Can he send you a few articles and then meet you for lunch on Wednesday to talk? He is going to have a small gathering at his house next week.  You are invited to that, too. You know climate change is a problem, but you haven’t read anything about it for a few years. (Who wants to read that depressing stuff? Plus, you have been so busy.) But you care about your friend, you are intrigued by his offer, and you realize that you probably should be more current on what is happening with our planet, anyway.

You accept. You make time. You read the most current assessment of how our climate has already changed, and where it is going. You realize that civilization will not be able to withstand this. Your mind is buzzing with questions, “What is going to happen? How can I protect my family? What should I do?”

You can hardly wait until Wednesday—to talk over what you have read with your friend, to talk about options. He tells you that he shares your feelings. Climate change is a massively destructive force, which will wipe out human civilization if we let it. But, he tells you; we don’t have to be helpless. We can fight back. Your friend describes his recent signing the Human Climate Pledge. The Human Climate Pledge has the following components:

An acknowledgement that:

•   Climate change threatens civilization.

•   Fighting climate change is an issue of survival and of morality. It must be our top political priority.

•   To preserve civilization, we must fight climate change like we fought WWII: with a government led, society-wide mobilization.

•   We must dedicate approximately the same amount of resources to fighting climate change as we did to fight the Axis powers: 36% of our GDP.  Or, in today’s economy, 5.6 trillion dollars, per year.

A pledge to:

•   Only give time or money to political candidates who also sign this pledge.

•   Vote for candidates who have signed the pledge in local, state, and national elections, when they are running against a candidate who has not signed.

•    Live in climate truth—to forsake denial, and face the frightening truth of climate change.

•   To spread the truth of climate change to people you know and love, and encourage them to sign the pledge also.

Your friend tells you how he learned about the Pledge, and why he decided to sign it two months ago. He shows you the Human Climate Pledge App on his phone, which displays the total number of signatories, and how many signatories he has brought on; the number of people he has given the pledge to, how many they have given the pledge to, how many they have given the pledge to, and so forth. It shows that, in total, 20,000 people have signed so far. And your friend has thus far given it to 8 people: his wife, brothers, and a small group of friends, and that they has so far given the ledge to 20 other people, mainly their family and friends.

He tells you that he asked you to talk because he cares about you, and respects you and knows that there are many people who would find your opinion influential. He tells you he hopes you join this effort; that you sign the pledge and spread it to other people. That you will join him in living in climate truth, and fighting this war of wars. He asks if you want some more reading, and recommends a few further books and articles; he gives you a  written copy of the pledge for you to consider. He invites you, Sunday at 8:00, to come to his house to talk more, and to take the pledge, if you are ready to. Bring someone, if you like. Five other people, some of whom you know, are planning to attend, some may take the pledge at that time.

You part ways, your head spinning. Your friend has always been mild mannered and reasonable. Someone you have respected, and viewed as similar to yourself. This is unlike anything he has ever been involved with. Maybe he is onto something. And the articles you read were certainly upsetting. And the weather has been so strange…

Over the next few days, you read more and more. You knew the climate was changing, but you didn’t realize all of the different things that this would impact: Rising sea levels, damaged agricultural yield, vector borne disease, resource wars, climate refugees.  The information is hard. The whole world is changing, and it is happening very fast.

On Sunday, you arrive at 8:00 with some snacks and a bottle of wine. The atmosphere is somber, but friendly. You are happy to see some people you haven’t seen in awhile, and meet some of your friend’s neighbors. You discuss the material you have read, and what has been happening in your area. Your friend puts on a 20-minute video from the organizers of the Human Climate Pledge. It’s a summary of the impacts of climate change, and a discussion of the Pledge. It’s a call to arms, an invitation to join.

Your friend asks if anyone is ready to take the pledge. Three people say that they are. They stand. Your friend asks if they want to dedicate their pledge to anyone, or offer any comments to the group. A woman says she wants to dedicate her pledge to her children. She says she would do anything to protect them, and knows that fighting climate is something that we have to do, together. A man says his pledge is dedicated to his deceased mother, who always hated and feared pollution. After they have offered their comments, they stand and recite the pledge in unison. The rest of the group claps. People have tears in their eyes.

Your friend enters the new signatories information into the system, via his HCP App. The new signatories now download the HCP App themselves. They now have the capacity—and the responsibility—to give the pledge to others. To induct them into the Human Climate Movement. Your friend tells the new signatories that he has some buttons, armbands, and bumper stickers, if they want to broadcast their pledge visually.

He says he will be having people over to his house again in 2 weeks. All are invited back, and invited to bring others. Maybe people will feel ready to sign. People spend the rest of the evening eating and drinking together. There is a good atmosphere in the air. It feels like hope.

Specifics of a Person-to-Person, pledge based approach

As I have attempted to illustrate in the above narrative, this approach utilizes pledge-signing as a central tactic in the Human Climate Movement. The pledge specifies that the signer agrees that climate change is an immediate, existential threat to civilization, and that a WWII-style response is called for. The signatory pledges only to donate money and time to candidates who have signed, and to vote for any candidate who has signed the pledge over any candidate who has not. In this way, the pledge functions as a reclamation of Democracy. The signatories recognize that the government is failing in its most important function: protecting its people. The signatories pledge to wield their power as citizens, and as humans, to push policy makers into action.

Signatories also pledge to “Live in Climate Truth,” meaning to actively commit to fighting their own tendencies to deny, minimize, and dissociate their knowledge and to share their knowledge with others. I have written elsewhere on the principle of Living in Climate Truth. The idea comes from Vaclav Havel, who noted that—when a system, such as the Soviet Union in the 1970s—was built on lies—that individual citizens disbelieved the regime’s lies, but acted compliantly in order to avoid trouble. Havel saw revolutionary potential in this state of affairs. If a system is built on a lie, and people know it’s a lie but keep that opinion private, publicly demonstrating their allegiance to the system, then the system is ready to crumble. All it takes is for people to live in truth: to act on what they believe, to be open about it. This lessens the amount of pressure to conform that other people feel, making it easier for them to live in truth, also. One of the ways we live within the Climate Lie is we don’t talk about climate change socially. Climate change makes people uncomfortable and anxious, so we don’t mention it. We may be depressed or terrified about the climate, but we don’t want to be a downer or a drag. The Human Climate Pledge signatories promise to live in Climate Truth; to face the truth of climate change themselves, and to share their truth with others.

Specifically, signatories pledge to spread the Human Climate Pledge to others, especially people they know and love. One scenario for how signatories can recruit others was demonstrated in the narrative. But there are infinite ways that people can approach others with the Human Climate Pledge. They could give a special presentation in church or a community meeting; they can have informal conversations; they can invite friends to a recurring climate-themed book-group; they can have conversations over the phone or through video-conferencing technology; they could convince existing environmental or political groups to take the pledge together. Getting people to sign the pledge will, in most cases, require a fair amount of education. Signatories can encourage friends and family to read books or articles about climate change, or attend presentations. Knowledge sharing and consciousness raising are central parts of a person-to-person approach.

Reaching out to people, personally, and sharing the reality of climate change, as well as the hope of the Human Climate Pledge, becomes the central organizing tactic of the Human Climate Movement; it becomes what civil disobedience was to civil rights. Pledge recruitment, like civil disobedience, allows activists to utilize their creativity, and adapt to specific situations. People are experts in their own networks. They know what might appeal to their family and friends. They speak their language, literally and metaphorically.

A mobile phone App should be developed to structure and track the progress of the Human Climate Pledge. The HCP App is received when someone takes the pledge, and it allows that person to give the pledge to others. This enforces a person-to-person structure. One cannot take the pledge online. (How many online pledges have you signed and then forgotten about?) They must receive the pledge from someone who has already taken it. They must take the pledge in person, ideally with others present. This reinforces the message that fighting climate change is a shared human endeavor; something we must pursue together and help each other with.

This person-to-person structure, and the utilization of a HCP App also allows for detailed tracking of pledges. It can track, and display: 1) How many people, total, have taken the pledge to date; 2) How many people you have given the pledge to 3) How many people those people have given the pledge to, how many those people have given the pledge to, and so on. In other words, the App will track a person’s total impact in terms of spreading the pledge. If I give it to 10 people, who each give it to 10 people, who each give it to 10 people, my actions have helped spread the pledge to 1000 people. This number will be continually available, so a signatory can track their own impact.

The use of an App also allows for coordination between individuals and the central Human Climate Pledge organizing committee. Potential uses include: HCP central can communicate with signatories via the App, for example, about political candidates who have signed the pledge; members could use their App to request buttons/ bumper stickers, other visuals that indicate support for the HCP; members can donate funds to HCP central through their app; HCP central can track Pledge progress and identify people who are particularly effective in spreading the message of climate change and the Human Climate Pledge, and ask them to share their best practices, or give trainings to teach others their techniques.

Recruiting people, including politicians, to sign the Human Climate Pledge should be the central tactic of the Human Climate Movement. But it does not have to be the only tactic. Indeed, a concerted recruitment effort that creates both community-level connections, and connections with a centralized Human Climate organization will make it easier to mobilize signatories for other types of action, all which share the same focus: raising awareness so that the United States[1] can wake up to the threat of climate change, and respond.

Benefits of this approach

A person-to-person, pledge based approach offers myriad benefits as the central plank of the Human Climate Movement. Most importantly, it helps people contain their anxiety and channel it into action. By structuring the movement around existing human relationships, it allows people to support each other through their fear. An approach that unifies people allows them to gain strength from each other. The advocacy of a comprehensive plan contains anxiety further, and the recruitment-focus allows people to see their own role in the movements.  This is quite empowering, and the software that tracks how many people a member has given the pledge to, and how many people those individuals have given the pledge to serves as a constant, concrete reminder of a persons’ efficacy.

A person-to-person pledge based approach is an approach that is responsive to our current technological context. The Internet, social media, and ubiquitous smart phones are changing human behavior faster than politics can keep up with. The Obama campaign utilized the internet for coordinating meet-ups and volunteers in innovative ways and was richly rewarded for it. It should go without saying that a successful Human Climate Movement will have to use social media and technology in an innovative way if we are to find success. Social movements must leverage the technologies of their day; novel ways of using technology for and organizing and message-spreading provide a strategic advantage to movements, because the entrenched powers and vested interests do not have a counter-strategy available. (During the Civil Rights Movement, The Right did not have Fox News available to broadcast propaganda undermining the movement.)

A person-to-person approach utilizes technology in a novel way, but, perhaps more importantly, it is also built in response to a culture that is oversaturated with media and technology. A 2009 Nielson study showed that Americans spend 8.5 hours per day looking at some type of screen. On those screens, we are bombarded by every type of information: news, advertisements, political messaging, infotainment, and updates on strangers' lives. It is impossible to rationally process and filter this information; much of it is simply disregarded. Because of the cacophony, vested interests such as fossil fuel companies are easily able to warp the conversation by ginning up controversies and promoting phone “doubt” among scientists. Their arguments are paper thin, but because 1) the truth inspires anxiety and 2) most Americans don’t focus on the issue in a concerted way, but rather experience it as part of an over-stimulating barrage of information, they are effective.

A person-to-person approach cuts through the noise. It treats climate change as it should be treated: as critically important, deeply personal, and inherently political. When a friend calls to talk about something important to them—a crisis they are facing— most people stop what they are doing and pay attention.

A person-to-person approach allows the medium to be a major part of the message. This approach emphasizes unity, learning, cooperation, and human relationships; some of the best aspects of humanity. It frames fighting climate change as a shared project, rather than a divisive protest. It recognizes that we are all in this together; climate change is bigger than any of us. Our best hope is to utilize thoughtful, coordinated, courageous action.

Conclusion

I applied this analysis by offering an organizing strategy that makes anxiety-containment the central goal. It is the best strategy that I can think of.  Perhaps a more effective strategy exists in someone else’s mind; certainly this approach can be improved and refined though collaboration with others. I encourage and welcome disagreement and constructive criticism, both on the psychological forces at play in the Civil Rights Movement, or the Human Climate Movement, and regarding the optimal strategy for organizing the Movement. Perhaps we can crowd-source strategy for the Human Climate Movement.

I encourage all who approach these questions to do so with a theoretical orientation guided by the history and theory of social movements, psychology, or anthropology rather than (just) an understanding of the current political situation. Aggressive action on climate change is not possible in today’s political climate. But social movements transform the political climate. They make us look at the past and ask, “How could things have ever been that way? How could we have been so ignorant?” They realign the stars. This is exactly the level of change that we need to fight climate change.  It’s a tall order, but the other option is passive suicide. Let’s put our heads together and get to work solving this. I hope you join me.

[1] Though this strategy has been designed for the United States, there is not reason why is cannot also be easily applied to other Democratic countries. Countries that do not have a voting process will require a more involved modification.

Part II. A Psychologically Informed Strategy Proposal for the Human Climate Movement

Introduction

In the previous section, I have delineated the ways in which the Human Climate Movement shares goals with the Civil Rights Movement, but differs in the barriers to those goals, and the technological context.  I argue that both movements must 1) empower their membership, 2) place the truth front and center, forcing Americans out of denial and destroying the illusion of neutrality and 3) create massive social and political pressure, especially among elites and policy makers, for change.

I showed that the movements are distinct, however, the fundamental barrier to the goals of the Civil Rights Movement was racism, while the fundamental barrier to the Human Climate Movement is anxiety. Civil disobedience fought racism but does not fight anxiety. Anxiety is best contained through the existence of a comprehensive plan that starts right now to and leads to victory and through human relationships. I also discuss the different technological contexts that these movements occurred in: while the Civil Rights Movement could capture the national attention through civil disobedience, in today’s oversaturated media environment, protests do this extremely rarely. I argued that, for these reasons, civil disobedience will not succeed as a primary strategy for the Human Climate Party.

In this section I will propose an alternative strategy for the Human Climate Movement that makes containing anxiety its central feature, and also responds to our current technological and media age.

A Comprehensive Plan to Contain Anxiety and Fight Climate Change

I discussed previously how a plan is a fundamental tool to contain anxiety. To effectively contain anxiety, a plan must be believable and comprehensive. It must lead from right now to victory. In the case of climate change, this means that it must have two distinct parts: 1) A plan to ignite a social and political movement powerful enough to fundamentally change the national approach to climate change and 2) A plan for how to actually fight climate change, once the social movement has succeeded in creating the social and political will necessary to impel legislative action.

Many social movements, including the Civil Rights Movement, move forward step-by-step, gaining momentum from every small victory. They do not have a comprehensive plan at the beginning, but rather plan as they go. The Human Climate Movement is attempting this currently—hoping that victories such as university divestment or stopping the Keystone pipeline will lead to a larger movement and ever-larger victories. The problem with this stepwise approach is that it doesn’t contain anxiety. It doesn’t offer a path to victory—to a planet safe for humanity. This means that, while building gradually has worked for other social movements, the Human Climate Movement must start with an all-encompassing plan for success.

Luckily, a plan to fight climate change, once we recognize the depths of the crisis and muster the social and political will to fight back, already exists. Paul Gilding and Jorgen Randers prepared a “ One Degree War Plan” which approaches fighting climate change with the same zeal and urgency of purpose that the Allies fought WWII.  It is a plan to prevent further emissions as much as possible and remove greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere, while also pursuing adaptation measures and low-risk, reversible geoengineering strategies. Their plan cuts emissions by 50% in the first 5 years, and to become entirely carbon neutral in 20 years. The next 80 years will be dedicated to recovering from the damage that has already been locked into the system. Their aggressive approach includes, during the first 5 years of the war:  closing 1000 coal plants, building wind farms and solar arrays in order to compensate for some of the lost energy and encouraging efficiency measures and electricity rationing for the rest of the energy losses; decreasing commercial flights by 10% a year; cutting deforestation by 50%; utilizing agricultural and forestry methods that bind 1 gigaton of carbon into the soil; and instituting a carbon tax of $20 a tonne, which increases by $20 a year until it reaches $100 per tonne of carbon. The entire plan is available here.

Gilding and Randers prepared their plan as an example of what could be accomplished with a war approach, the details were meant to be flexible, and should change according to cutting edge scientific understanding, technological breakthroughs, and new ideas I, for example, would advocate for the creation of a “Climate Corps” in which young people were drafted out of high school for 2 years of public service, fighting climate change. We could put the Climate Core to work on projects such as insulating homes, building sea walls and levies, and spreading agricultural techniques that bind carbon in the soil.

Though the details must continue to evolve, the point of the Gilding & Randers plan is that: if the United States came out of denial and waged a WWII Level War on Climate Change, civilization would have a good chance, a fighting chance, of continuation. We would need allies, of course, just like in any war. It wouldn’t be easy, or simple, or short. But it would be humanity’s chance to be active participants in our destiny, rather than sitting, passive victims, waiting for climate change to wreak its havoc. Thus, a WWII approach should be the plan with which the Human Climate Movement fights for.

But how do we get there? How can we possibly muster the political will to start fighting? Gilding believes that, once climate change gets bad enough, humanity will realize that we have to fight back. It will be a spontaneous, global awakening.

I disagree. Denial is an incredibly strong force. When animals, including humans are in existential danger they generally do one of three things: fight, flight, or freeze (Schmitt et al., 2008).  They play dead and hope the danger passes them by. As a species, we are paralyzed by fear and disbelief (Hamilton 2010). As climate change worsens, we very well could become more frozen and more deeply in denial.  To switch gears into fight-for-our-life mode, we need a social movement. We need the Human Climate Movement to focus national attention, to fight denial, spread the truth, and usher in that awakening. And to do that, it needs a new strategy; one that is built around the goal of containing anxiety and that is responsive to our current technological situation.

A Person-to-Person, Pledge Based Approach

Imagine: Your phone rings. It’s your old friend. (Or your cousin, neighbor, or former roommate). He says he would like to talk with you about climate change. Can he send you a few articles and then meet you for lunch on Wednesday to talk? He is going to have a small gathering at his house next week.  You are invited to that, too. You know climate change is a problem, but you haven’t read anything about it for a few years. (Who wants to read that depressing stuff? Plus, you have been so busy.) But you care about your friend, you are intrigued by his offer, and you realize that you probably should be more current on what is happening with our planet, anyway.

You accept. You make time. You read the most current assessment of how our climate has already changed, and where it is going. You realize that civilization will not be able to withstand this. Your mind is buzzing with questions, “What is going to happen? How can I protect my family? What should I do?”

You can hardly wait Wednesday—to talk over what you have read with your friend, to talk about options. He tells you that he shares your feelings. Climate change is a massively destructive force, which will wipe out human civilization if we let it. But, he tells you; we don’t have to be helpless. We can fight back. Your friend describes his recent signing the Human Climate Pledge. The Human Climate Pledge has the following components:

An acknowledgement that:

• Climate change threatens civilization.
• Fighting climate change it is an issue of survival and of morality. It must be our top political priority.
• To preserve civilization, we must fight climate change like we fought WWII: with a government led, society-wide mobilization.
• We must dedicate approximately the same amount of resources to fighting climate change as we did to fight the Axis powers: 36% of our GDP.  Or 5.6 trillion dollars, per year.

A pledge to:

• Only give time or money to political candidates who also sign this pledge.
• Vote for candidates who have signed the pledge in local, state, and national elections, when they are running against a candidate who has not signed.
•  Live in Climate truth—to forsake denial, and face the frightening truth of climate change.
• To spread the truth of climate change to people you know and love, and encourage them to sign the pledge also.

Your friend tells you how he learned about the Pledge, and why he decided to sign it two months ago. He shows you the Human Climate Pledge App on his phone, which displays the total number of signatories, and how many signatories he has brought on; the number of people he has given the pledge to, how many they have given the pledge to, how many they have given the pledge to, and so forth. It shows that, in total, 20,000 people have signed so far. And your friend has thus far given it to 8 people: his wife, brothers, and a small group of friends, and that they has so far given the ledge to 20 other people, mainly their family and friends.

He tells you that he asked you to talk because he cares about you, and respects you and knows that there are many people who would find your opinion influential. He tells you he hopes you join this effort; that you sign the pledge and spread it to other people. That you will join him in living in climate truth, and fighting this war of wars. He asks if you want some more reading, and recommends a few further books and articles, and gives you a written copy of the pledge for you to consider. He invites you, Sunday at 8:00, to come to his house to talk more, and to take the pledge, if you are ready to. Bring someone, if you like. Five other people, some of whom you know, are planning to attend, some may take the pledge at that time.

You part ways, your head spinning. Your friend has always been mild mannered and reasonable. Someone you have respected, and viewed as similar to yourself. This is unlike anything he has ever been involved with. Maybe he is onto something. And the articles you read were certainly upsetting. And the weather has been so strange…

Over the next few days, you read more and more. You knew the climate was changing, but you didn’t realize all of the different things that this would impact: Rising sea levels, damaged agricultural yield, vector borne disease, resource wars, climate refugees.  The information is hard. The whole world is changing, and it is happening very fast.

On Sunday, you arrive at 8:00 with some snacks and a bottle of wine. The atmosphere is somber, but friendly. You are happy to see some people you haven’t seen in a while, and meet some of your friend’s neighbors. You discuss the material you have read, and what has been happening in your area. Your friend puts on a 20-minute video from the organizers of the Human Climate Pledge. It’s a summary of the impacts of climate change, and a discussion of the Pledge. It’s a call to arms, an invitation to join.

Your friend asks if anyone is ready to take the pledge. 3 people say that they are. They stand. Your friend asks if they want to dedicate their pledge to anyone, or offer any comments to the group. A woman says she wants to dedicate her pledge to her children. She says she would do anything to protect them, and knows that fighting climate is something that we have to do, together. A man says his pledge is dedicated to his deceased mother, who always hated and feared pollution. After they have offered their comments, they stand and recite the pledge in unison. The rest of the group claps. People have tears in their eyes.

Your friend enters the new signatories information into the system, via his HCP App. The new signatories now download the HCP App themselves. They now have the capacity—and the responsibility—to give the pledge to others. To induct them into the Human Climate Movement. Your friend tells the new signatories that he has some buttons, armbands, and bumper stickers, if they want to broadcast their pledge visually.

He says he will be having people over to his house again in 2 weeks. All are invited back, and invited to bring others. Maybe people will feel ready to sign. People spend the rest of the evening eating and drinking together. There is a good atmosphere in the air. It feels like hope.

Specifics of a Person-to-Person, pledge based approach

As I have attempted to illustrate in the above narrative, this approach utilizes pledge-signing as a central tactic in the Human Climate Movement. The pledge specifies that the signer agrees that climate change is an immediate, existential threat to civilization, and that a WWII style response is called for. The signatory pledges only to donate money and time to candidates who have signed, and to vote for any candidate who has signed the pledge over any candidate who has not. In this way, the pledge functions as a reclamation of Democracy. The signatories recognize that the government is failing in its most important function: protecting its people. The signatories pledge to wield their power as citizens, and as humans, to push policy makers into action.

Signatories also pledge to “Live in Climate Truth,” meaning to actively commit to fighting their own tendencies to deny, minimize, and dissociate their knowledge and to share their knowledge with others. I have written elsewhere on the principle of Living in Climate Truth. The idea comes from Vaclav Havel, who noted that—when a system, such as the Soviet Union in the 1970s—was built on lies—that individual citizens disbelieved the regime’s lies, but acted compliant in order to avoid trouble. Havel saw revolutionary potential in this state of affairs. If a system is built on a lie, and people know it’s a lie but keep that opinion private, publicly demonstrating their allegiance to the system, then the system is ready to crumble. All it takes is for people to live in truth: to act on what they believe, to be open about it. This lessens the amount of pressure to conform other people feel, making it easier for them to live in truth, also. One of the ways we live within the Climate Lie is we don’t talk about it socially. Climate change makes people uncomfortable and anxious, so we don’t mention it. We may be depressed or terrified about the climate, but don’t want to be a downer or a drag. The Human Climate Pledge signatories promise to live in Climate Truth; to face the truth of climate change themselves, and to share their truth with others.

Specifically, signatories pledge to spread the Human Climate Pledge to others, especially people they know and love. One scenario for how signatories can recruit others was demonstrated in the narrative. But there are infinite ways that people can approach others with the Human Climate Pledge. They could give a special presentation in church or a community meeting; they can have informal conversations; they can invite friends to a recurring climate themed book-group; they can have conversations over the phone or through video-conferencing technology; they could convince existing environmental or political groups to take the pledge together. Getting people to sign the pledge will, in most cases, require a fair amount of education. Signatories can encourage friends and family to read books or articles about climate change, or attend presentations. Knowledge sharing and consciousness raising are central parts of a person-to-person approach.

Reaching out to people, personally, and sharing the reality of climate change, as well as the hope of the Human Climate Pledge, becomes the central organizing tactic of the Human Climate Movement; it becomes what civil disobedience was to civil rights. Pledge recruitment (like civil disobedience) allows activists to utilize their creativity, and adapt to specific situations. People are experts in their own networks. They know what might appeal to their family and friends. They speak their language, literally and metaphorically.

A mobile phone App should be developed to structure and track the progress of the Human Climate Pledge. The HCP App is received when someone takes the pledge, and it allows that person to give the pledge to others. This enforces a person-to-person structure. One cannot take the pledge online. (How many online pledges have you signed and then forgotten about?) They must receive the pledge from someone who has already taken it. They must take the pledge in person, ideally with others present. This reinforces the message that fighting climate change is a shared human endeavor; something we must pursue together and help each other with.

This person-to-person structure, and the utilization of a HCP App also allows for detailed tracking of pledges. It can track, and display: 1) How many people, total, have taken the pledge to date; 2) How many people you have given the pledge to 3) How many people those people have given the pledge to, how many those people have given the pledge to, and so on. In other words, the App will track a person’s total impact in terms of spreading the pledge. If I give it to 10 people, who each give it to 10 people, who each give it to 10 people, my actions have helped spread the pledge to 1000 people. This number will be continually available.

The use of an App also allows for coordination between individuals and the central Human Climate Pledge organizing committee. Potential uses include: HCP central can communicate with signatories via the App, for example, about political candidates who have signed the pledge; members could use their App to request buttons/ bumper stickers, other visuals that indicate support for the HCP; members can donate funds to HCP central through their app; HCP central can track Pledge progress and identify people who are particularly effective in spreading the message of Climate Change and the Human Climate Pledge, and ask them to share their best practices, or give trainings to teach others their techniques.

Recruiting people, including politicians, to sign the Human Climate Pledge should be the central tactic of the Human Climate Movement. But it does not necessarily have to be the only tactic. Indeed, a concerted recruitment effort that creates both community-level connections, and connections with a centralized Human Climate organization will make it easier to mobilize signatories for other types of action, all which share the same focus: raising awareness so that the United States can wake up to the threat of climate change, and respond with a WWII level approach.

Benefits of this approach

A person-to-person, pledge based approach offers myriad benefits as the central plank of the Human Climate Movement. Most importantly, it helps people contain their anxiety and channel it into action. By structuring the movement around existing human relationships, it allows people to support each other through their fear. An approach that unifies people allows them to gain strength from each other. The advocacy of a comprehensive plan contains anxiety further, and the recruitment-focus allows people to see their own role in the movements.  This is quite empowering, and the software that tracks how many people a member has given the pledge to, and how many people those individuals have given the pledge to serves as a constant, concrete reminder of a persons’ efficacy.

A person-to-person pledge based approach is an approach that is responsive to our current technological context. The Internet, social media, and ubiquitous smart phones are changing human behavior faster than politics can keep up with. The Obama campaign utilized the internet for coordinating meet-ups and volunteers in innovative ways and was richly rewarded for it. It should probably go without saying that a successful Human Climate Movement will have to use social media and technology in an innovative way if we are to find success. Social movements must leverage the technologies of their day; novel ways of using technology for and organizing and message-spreading provide a strategic advantage to movements, because the entrenched powers and vested interests do not have a counter-strategy available. (During the Civil Rights Movement, The Right did not have Fox News available to broadcast propaganda undermining the movement.)

A person-to-person approach utilizes technology in a novel way, but, perhaps more importantly, it is also built in response to a culture that is over saturated with media and technology. A 2009 Nielson study showed that Americans spend 8.5 hours per day looking at some type of screen. On those screens, we are bombarded by every type of information: news, advertisements, political messaging, infotainment, and updates on strangers lives. It is impossible to rationally process and filter this information; much of it is simply disregarded. Because of the cacophony, vested interests such as fossil fuel companies are easily able to warp the conversation by ginning up controversies and promoting phone “doubt” among scientists. Their arguments are paper thin, but because 1) the truth inspires anxiety and 2) most Americans don’t focus on the issue in a concerted way, but rather experience it as part of an over-stimulating barrage of information, they are effective.

A person-to-person approach cuts through the noise. It treats climate change as it should be treated: as critically important, deeply personal, yet inherently political. When a friend calls to talk about something important to them—a crisis they are facing— most people stop what they are doing and pay attention.

A person-to-person approach allows the medium to be a major part of the message. This approach emphasizes unity, learning, cooperation, and human relationships; some of the best aspects of humanity. It frames fighting climate change as a shared project, rather than a divisive protest. It recognizes that we are all in this together; climate change is bigger than any of us. Our best hope is to utilize thoughtful, coordinated, courageous action.

Conclusion

In the first section of this paper, I described ways that the Human Climate Movement is psychologically similar to, and different from, the Civil Rights Movement. I argue that, while the goals of fighting denial are the same, the fundamental barrier to fighting the Civil Rights Movement was racism, while the fundamental barrier to fighting climate change is anxiety.

In the second section of this paper, I applied this analysis by offering an organizing strategy that makes anxiety-containment the central goal. It is the best strategy that I can think of.  Perhaps a more effective strategy exists in someone else’s mind; certainly this approach can be improved and refined though collaboration with others. I encourage and welcome disagreement and constructive criticism, both on the psychological forces at play in the Civil Rights Movement, or the Human Climate Movement, and regarding the optimal strategy for organizing the Movement. Perhaps we can crowd-source strategy for the Human Climate Movement.

I encourage all who approach these questions to do so with a theoretical orientation guided by the history and theory of social movements, psychology, or anthropology rather than (just) an understanding of the current political situation. Aggressive action on climate change is not possible in today’s political climate. But social movements transform the political climate. They make us look at the past and ask, “How could things have ever been that way? How could we have been so ignorant?” They realign the stars. This is exactly the level of change that we need to fight Climate Change.  It’s a tall order, but the other option is passive suicide. Let’s put our heads together and get to work solving this. I hope you join me.

References:

Alford, C. (2001). Leadership by Interpretation and Holding.Organisational and Social Dynamics, 1, 153-173.

Cohen, S. (2001). States of denial: Knowing about atrocities and suffering. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Hamilton, C. (2010). Requiem for a species: Why we resist the truth about climate change. London: Earthscan.

Leiserowitz, A., Maibach, E., Roser-Renouf, C., Feinberg, G. & Howe, P. (2013) Global Warming’s Six Americas. Yale University and George Mason University. New Haven, CT: Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. http://environment.yale.edu/climate/publications/Six-Americas-September-2012

Lertzman, 2013. The Myth of Apathy. In (S. Weintrobe) Engaging with climate change: Psychoanalytic and interdisciplinary perspectives. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Morris, A. D. (1999). A Retrospective on the Civil Rights Movement: Political and Intellectual Landmarks. Annual Review of Sociology, 25,  517.

Romm, J., (2012) Hug the Monster: Why so many climate scientists have stopped downplaying the climate threat. Think Progres. http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/05/07/478984/hug-the-monster-why-so-
many-climate-scientists-have-stopped-downplaying-the-climate-threat/

Schmidt, N. B., Richey, J. A., Zvolensky, M. J., & Maner, J. K. (2008).Exploring human freeze responses to a threat stressor.  Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 39, 3, 292-304.

Thomas, 2004. Southern Spaces. Television News and the Civil Rights Struggle: The Views in Virginia and Mississippi. http://southernspaces.org/2004/television-news-and-civil-rights-struggle-views-
virginia-and-mississippi#section10

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Editor’s Note: Tara Lohan traveled across the U.S. documenting communities impacted by energy development for a new AlterNet project,  Hitting Home. Follow the trip on  Facebook.

Wyoming is not short on scenic drives. You can hug the shores of Yellowstone Lake on Route 20. You can get caught in a traffic jam of bison on Teton Park Road. You can try to keep pace with the Snake River as your vehicle huffs and puffs over the mountainous Route 189.

I did all of those things this summer, but first I took a different sort of drive, which put the beauty of these places in context. I drove the “Climate Change Highway”: Route 59, south of Gillette in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. It’s hundreds of miles from the touristy byways of Yellowstone and the Tetons, yet what happens along this road in the next decade may well determine our future.

There’s not exactly a sign proclaiming that Route 59 is the Climate Change Highway, like there is for California’s “Petroleum Highway,” along Route 33. It’s a pet name given by Shannon Anderson, an organizer with the Powder River Basin Resource Council in Sheridan, Wyoming.

The PRBRC calls for “responsible development” in the Powder River Basin, which encompasses parts of southeastern Montana and northeastern Wyoming. “I call it the Climate Change Highway because of the coal mines, the fracking, the coal-bed methane — it’s everything,” said Anderson.

The Powder River Basin provides more coal than any other region in the country, is home to one of the largest gasfields, and now may be the site of the next oil boom, too. The impacts of burning just coal from the basin make the area the single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the nation.

Coal Country

To get to the Climate Change Highway from the cowboy town of Sheridan, I avoid the interstate and head southeast on the two-lane meandering Route 14/16. It’s rolling hills, grassland, ranches, and mostly sage dotting the fencelines along the road. Cottonwoods huddle by creeks and streams.

It’s not long before I’m passing through Clearmont and my truck is running right alongside one of Warren Buffet’s coal trains.

Around here the rails are dominated by BNSF—the second largest freight train network on the continent. It’s a wholly owned subsidiary of Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway and the former marriage of the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe railroads. Buffet’s hands (and checkbook) are dirtied with coal dust (numerous lawsuits have been launched against BNSF’s coal trains for health and environmental impacts), and BNSF also hauls diluents that are key to tar sands mining as well as pipeline materials. It's fitting that Buffet’s rail network parallels the Climate Change Highway.

Before I get to Gillette, the self-proclaimed “Energy Capital of the Nation,” I pause at the Eagle Butte mine, owned by Alpha Natural Resources. There is a pull-out on the road, complete with a viewing platform where you can peer into the dusty abyss below. The coal hauling trucks and loaders that traverse the open-pit mine look miniature because of the scale—in reality, the wheels are about 13 feet high, but from my vantage they look like toy trucks playing in a sandbox. It’s a metaphor for our relationship with coal; too often we underestimate its impact when we’re too far removed from the digging, scraping and hauling. And maybe also when we’re too far removed from the burning of coal. And from the climate science.

As I continue my drive south of Gillette on Route 59, there are signs for more mines like Caballo (Peabody), Belle Ayr (Alpha), Cordero Rojo (Cloud Peak), and Coal Creek (Arch), although none of them provide viewing platforms like Eagle Butte. Fences separate passersby from the action and the dust obscures whatever views remain. (See an interactive map of all the mines here.) Occasionally I can make out the specter of a dragline, the massive excavators that can weigh up to 13,000 tons. I catch the outline of one on the horizon as I stop to photograph a pronghorn in the sage.

These “truck and shovel” strip mines don’t make for great neighbors, to humans or wildlife.

“The main problem is water depletion and air impacts, given the scale of the mines,” Anderson told me before I left the Power River Basin Resource Council’s Sheridan office. “There are 13 incredibly large strip mines in a 50-mile radius.”

What’s large? The basin supplies 40 percent of the nation’s coal, for a total of 400 millions tons annually. Half of which comes from two mammoth mines, Black Thunder (Arch) and North Antelope (Peabody).

Coal mining began in the region in the 1970s but it didn’t really take off until the 1990s, ironically because of amendments to the Clean Air Act that sought to curb acid rain. There is a lot of coal relatively close to the surface and the seams can be 10 stories high, which sounds like a mining company’s dream. But it’s also low-sulfur coal, which wasn’t a high selling point until environmental regulations sought to limit the amount of sulfur coming from coal-burning power plants. Suddenly, low-sulfur Power River Basin coal was in hot demand.

There is a good chance you live in a state that burns PRB coal—it’s fed to 200 power plants in 38 states. And about 4 million tons of Wyoming’s PRB coal is exported annually, although much more of Montana’s Powder River Basin coal makes it to West Coast ports. Anderson says some of Wyoming’s coal actually travels all the way to Appalachia and the East Coast where it is mixed with locally mined coal, or exported to Europe.

If the coal industry gets its way, hundreds of millions of tons more of the region’s coal will travel overseas. The prime vehicle for making this happen are Pacific Northwest export terminals, but they’re being fought tooth and nail in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. In recent years, six such terminals were in the works, but half have already been scrapped. Arch Coal CEO John Eaves told industry publication Platts, “I think port capacity on the West Coast is important, because over time we think more western coal will be going to Asian markets.”

Arch has a big stake in seeing more exports. It owns the basin’s largest mine, Black Thunder. When I passed by the mine, only glimpses of one of its massive pits was visible from the road (and my requests for a tour were declined). A sign warned of orange clouds from blasting emissions. Just down the road, I watched as empty train cars clanked slowly through a load-out facility, emerging heaped with coal, freshly washed. I gave up counting the cars somewhere after 100.

What was passing by was not just a good chunk of our nation’s energy supply, but a whole lot of soon-to-be pollution. Thirteen percent of our country’s greenhouse gas emissions come from the basin’s coal when it’s burned.

There are also other local impacts: diesel exhaust from trains and trucks, impacts to groundwater in an arid state, nitrogen emissions from blasting that contribute to ground-level ozone, and the slow pace of reclamation. Companies are required to post a bond before operations begin. The bond is released when they’ve completed the necessary reclamation to restore the land, vegetation and water after the mine closes. So far companies have been better at mining than reclaiming.

“Less than 4 percent of the acreage that has been mined has been released from final bond,” said Anderson. “That limits land that can be used by wildlife and for recreation and ranching.”

The flip side is always jobs. “Coal mining jobs are good jobs,” says Anderson. “You can get $70,000 a year to drive a truck and you can do it without a high school degree. The industry is strong and powerful and employs a lot of people. It doesn’t see the boom and bust that oil and gas does and uranium. It’s been pretty steady for 30 years.”

That’s true, but coal’s share of the electricity generation in the U.S. has fallen some, in part because of natural gas prices. Numbers from the first half of 2013 show that coal may have regained its footing somewhat, but either way, the natural gas market still impacts the Powder River Basin.

Make Way For Fracking

Where the prairie has not been blasted for coal, the Powder River Basin has been engineered for the extraction of coal-bed methane. In between the coal mines on my drive I can see the infrastructure: pipelines, wells and processing plants.

Much of it is derelict, too.

“Coal-bed methane is lesser quality, so when the price of gas tanked, CBM fell off the radar as an economically viable resource,” explains Anderson. “There are roughly 25,000 wells in the basin, about half are shut in.”

The energy market is a fickle thing. Now companies in the basin are turning their sights to more lucrative exploits like deep oil wells, and abandoning the coal-bed methane (and the infrastructure they constructed to extract and transport it). This is already after the industry has been blamed for drawing down the local aquifer by pumping more than 309 billion gallons of groundwater for CBM production.

Hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling now allow for access to previously unreachable pockets of oil more than 10,000 feet deep. The night before I left for my drive I overheard a local at a restaurant telling a visiting couple he was going to hit it rich because the Powder River Basin will be the next Bakken Shale.

Having arrived in Wyoming after visiting North Dakota’s Bakken Shale, where an oil boom is well underway, my interest was piqued. In the Bakken the prairie has been overtaken by more than 9,000 producing wells, with plans for tens of thousands more. Everywhere you look are well pads that extract oil and flare gas into the air and trucks clogging the roads that transport oil, water, chemicals, sand, and equipment. Small towns are overflowing with newly arrived workers, many of whom live in “man camps” of RVs and mobile homes as construction can’t keep pace with employment.

The same fate may be in store for the Powder River Basin. Heading south on 59 toward Douglas the beginnings of an oil boom are underway. I can already see the drilling rigs and sites than have been bulldozed flat for well pads. I can see gas flaring from newly producing oil wells—torches on the horizon. Truck traffic is nowhere near as bad as what I saw in the Bakken, but it’s not insignificant either. Deer and pronghorn dart from the sides of the road.

I’m beginning to think the road ahead is not paved with good intentions. If Wyoming is any indication, the future looks like more coal, more oil, and more gas … when it’s lucrative. Coal’s days of dominance are numbered, but a steep slide may not happen for decades if we keep up our current habits. The biggest gains in new power generation are coming from renewable sources like wind and solar, but it’s still a tiny portion of our national portfolio.

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

Is there a different path forward? Looking to the top doesn’t provide easy answers. President Obama has stood behind the “overwhelming judgment of science” about climate change and declared earlier this year that the U.S. would cut carbon pollution and use less dirty energy.

Industry has accused Obama of a “war on coal” but if the President is waging a war, he seems to have no desire to win it. In the Powder River Basin the federal government actually owns most of the mineral rights and there are no signs yet that the administration will halt coal leases there. Even the system by which the government grants leases has been heavily criticized.

Representative Edward Markey, a ranking member of the natural resources committee asked the Government Accountability Office to examine the federal coal-leasing project.

“Companies mining federal leases in Wyoming and Montana are increasing coal exports not only because of declining U.S. demand but also because they can sell coal for higher prices in foreign markets,” Markey wrote in 2012. “Arch Coal told investors last year that Powder River Basin coal sold to international customers could fetch more than $20 a ton. By comparison, the company in 2012 contracted with mostly domestic buyers to sell coal from the basin for an average of $14.40 per ton… The highest price ever received by the federal government for a lease sale in the Powder River Basin was $1.10 per ton.”  

The GAO is investigating the matter, as is the Interior Department’s inspector general. It’s not climate change or the worry about environmental impacts that are driving the concern, it’s that we may be getting short-changed.

The way it works is that the federal coal lease program goes to the highest bidder, but usually there is just one bidder—the coal company that asked for the auction in the first place.

“In the 26 coal leases the federal government has awarded in southeastern Montana and northeastern Wyoming since 1991, 22 have gone to a single bidder,” wrote Juliet Eilperin from the Washington Post. “In the other four instances, there were only two bidders involved.”

Because the lease program was designed to ensure there was ample stock of coal to fuel our economy, the government didn’t seem to mind giving away leases for cheap and mining companies made big bucks. But now that estimated reserves for the Powder River Basin are 25 years and the leading companies there are interested in spending that time trying to get the coal to more lucrative foreign markets, it’s irked some people in Washington.  

The Powder River Basin Natural Resource Council and a slew of other environmental groups wrote to Interior Secretary Sally Jewell early this year asking for a moratorium on new leases. These organizations are concerned with more than just money. They wrote:

Between 2011 and 2012, BLM leased over 2.1 billion tons of coal in the Powder River Basin, unlocking nearly 3.5 billion metric tons of CO2 that will be released when this coal is burned. In comparison, EPA’s newest passenger vehicle emissions standards will reduce an estimated 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide over the lifetime of cars made from 2017-2025.

One step forward, two steps back.

This August the BLM put up 148 million tons of coal for auction in the Maysdorf II tract in the Powder River Basin and for the first time not a single company took the bait, including Cloud Peak, which requested the auction several years ago. Is it a sign of the times?

It may well be. The coming focus for resource extraction in the region will likely be oil drilling, with techniques like horizontal drilling and fracking aiding a boom. The Wyoming Oil and Gas Commission did not return requests for an interview but a report from the Powder River Basin Resource Council says the BLM anticipates 3,800 new wells in the basin counties Campbell and Johnson in the next 10 years. And each well is likely to take at least 4 million gallons of water each time it’s fracked, which means over 1,000 truck trips to haul in water and remove waste. That translates to more emission, groundwater impacts, spill threats, and when that oil is burned, more greenhouse gas emissions.

Is this the road we want to head down? If so, we’re in for a hell of a trip.